| In
the early ‘70s, the world exploded in a new freewheeling
culture; Idi Amin was African rock ‘n roll. “I
am the father of Uganda!” he thunders to an adoring
crowd after his coup puts him in power, and wild celebration
erupts across the land. Kevin Mcdonald’s must-see The
Last King of  Scotland
paints Amin as an intoxicating mix of nationalist pride and
love/hate of colonial tradition. His ebullient, charismatic
Amin was indeed Uganda —and therein lies the rub, and
the film. For Idi Amin was a state without a nation;
as in any state devoid of law and institutions, every one
of its “children” thus stood as a potential threat
to this precarious leadership. All too soon the murdering
begins—the surest path to tighten his grip on a nation
built of his will alone.
We
come to see in fascinating detail Amin as a complex brute,
but the real moral centerpiece of the movie is Nicholas Garrigan
(James McAvoy, as simple and pure here as his faun in Narnia)
as the Everyman to Amin’s aberration. The movie starts
out with familiar memes: the likeable, young hipster, staunchly
anti-British and horrified at middle-class life, off to Africa
to learn a lesson or two about life, to perhaps save some
lives, or to at least despair winningly at the ineffectuality
of his compassion. We all know a funny, attractive Nicholas,
I’m sure. Like many newly minted grads, young Dr. Garrigan
flees what he fears will be a boring, stultified future, a
medical practice with Dad, for a gap-year adventure and ‘fun’
as a bush doctor in Africa. But Nicholas is easily seduced:
by women, by power, by excitement. In fact, his passive amorality
attracts seducers like moths to a flame. How could such a
man not meet up with Amin, the aggressive doppelganger to
his feckless opportunist?
As
he bumps along the road to his bush clinic, we enjoy with
him the “authenticity” of a poor but colorful
culture. We share his horror at the primitive conditions of
the clinic but expect to see him grow as a person and do his
plucky best. We even admire him for resisting Amin’s
importuning to become his personal physician after Nicholas
treats him for a minor injury. But here Mcdonald spins
the usual narrative of the white journalist or doctor in a
third world country right off its rails—and a much more
effective film results. It comes as a surprise when
after a few days at Amin’s luxury estate, flattered
by the access to power, the chance to really do good as Amin’s
health minister, and the non-stop party, he blows off the
clinic completely. The rest of the film takes place mostly
within the virtual walls of Amin’s orbit of power. Garrigan
chooses not to see the slaughter just outside his coddled
Eden of pool parties, disco bars, and high level governance—and
Mcdonald places us alongside Nicholas in his fool’s
paradise.
This
film brings us an understandable Amin, the feral politician,
who but for the grace of mandatory election cycles could be
any politician—but he is more ruthless here
than mad. Mcdonald ends with footage of the real
Idi Amin staring wordlessly into the camera in a manner akin
to the bear in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man,
a look Herzog termed “the implacable stare of nature.”
Amin knew who he was, indeed; but who is Nicholas—and
who are we? In the end, Amin is a fright, but it is the frivolous,
morally vacuous Nick, whose high spirits and thoughtless adventurism
leave betrayal and death in their wake, who truly haunts this
memorable film.
--
Patricia Ducey
 |
