Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
2/17/07
“Nobody cares about Africa.”
If it's not already there, add it to your list of movie cliches.
Every movie set in a war-torn African nation must feature at least one
character laying out this fact: the West can see as many images of
atrocities and innocent victims as the news can muster and will still be
unable to rouse itself to offer more than a brief humanitarian mission
and a few benefit concerts. I'm not saying this sentiment isn't true,
it is. But it does help when the movie itself cares more about
Africa than, say, The Last King of Scotland. After an intriguing
buildup, and despite a first-rate performance by presumptive Oscar winner
Forest Whitaker, the film all-too-quickly loses interest in anything other
than getting the Hell out of Kampala.
Feeling the weight of an
already mapped-out future in the family medical practice, Nicolas Garrigan
(James McAvoy) wants to run off to someplace exciting. He spins the
globe and, when his finger lands on Canada, spins it again. This
time, he hits Uganda. He gets there, knowing nothing about the country
and little at all except how to use his medical degree to land one night
stands with the local women. People in the countryside are celebrating
the military coup that's led Man of the People Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker)
to power. A chance encounter and Nicolas's quickness to grab Amin's
gun to put a dying cow out of its' misery show the gregarious new President
for Life that Garrigan is his kind of man. Soon enough, he's offered
the young doctor a position as his personal physician.
For a while, Nicolas loves
living the high life by the President's side, and doesn't mind stealing
glances (and perhaps more) at his lovely 3rd wife Kay (Kerry Washington).
There is danger, as supporters of ousted Prime Minister Obote make attempts
on Amin's life that come dangerously close to Nicolas. But by the
time he really notices that his employer has more than a nasty temper,
that outside the palace gates he's been slaughtering Ugandans by the thousands,
it's much too late to simply leave.
Oh, but leaving is all the
fictional composite character Nicolas Garrigan wishes to do, and therein
lies the greatest fault with The Last King of Scotland. Ugandans
are dying (off-screen, of course) by the tens of thousands but the movie
expects me to take that as nothing other than a reason to REALLY fear for
the safety of one poor, not-particularly likable white guy. Worse
yet, the movie so wants to let me know how much it cares about all these
Ugandans that it keeps having people lecture Nicolas about how much he
doesn't care. In the middle of a famous humanitarian catastrophe,
we get a doctor racing against time to perform an abortion so the President
won't learn that he's slept with his wife. Even when he gets around
to making casual attempts on Amin's life, it's only in hopes of persuading
a local British Intelligence officer (Simon McBurney) to sneak him out
of the country.
I'm not really sure what
the movie hopes to accomplish by offering Nicolas as our “in” to Amin's
story. By viewing the dictator 100% through the eyes of a Western
outsider, it fails to shed much light at all on what made this maniac so
charming, or this charmer such a maniac. And the Ugandan genocide
is essentially a Macguffin: if Amin's government were the mafia,
the “I try to get out but he keeps pulling me back in” plot mechanics would
be identical. The Last King of Scotland is really a noir thriller
dressed up in a costume of social consciousness.
Which is a shame, because
Whitaker is every bit as good as advertised, his performance embodying
the cycle of hope turned to tragedy that so often accompanies populist
leaders in the Third World. He works the character's mood swings
from delightful to deadly to perfection, and I was very afraid of him even
if not on Nicolas' behalf. Of course, as so often happens, Whitaker's
placement in the Best Actor Oscar category rather than Best Supporting
Actor is a joke. Amin is never on-screen without Nicolas (who, in
fact, is in basically every scene), and the story is never told from his
point of view, only as we view him from the outside through Nicolas.
The choice to tell the story from the wrong point of view is the biggest
reason why the movie fails, so his awards season misplacement is even more
glaring. As an old X-Files junkie, I should also single out
Gillian Anderson, who turns in a fine supporting performance as a fellow
expatriate who sees through Amin from the beginning.
I also had some issues with
Kevin Macdonald's direction: I thought Airplane! had put to
rest the device of surrounding the heads of tormented sleeping characters
with the those of other characters repeating their lines in echoing voices.
And I was really frustrated by the movie's refusal to tell me what year
it was, although a little research into the real events of Amin's reign
showed me that what seems to take no more than a few months onscreen actually
happened over a period of six years, so that might have something to do
with it.
Ever since the uproar over
Mississippi
Burning, critics have ground an ax about movies where saintly white
people help to solve the problems of oppressed Africans or African-Americans.
I've never really gotten this: if good people try to do the right
thing, who cares about their race? But I have to say that The
Last King of Scotland did annoy me in a reverse way. The movie
doesn't seem to care at all about the fates of its' black characters, only
that one white guy who made the mistake of hanging out on the wrong side
of the globe make it safely back to his father's country house in Merry
Old Scotland. We can debate whether or not it's racist, but it certainly
does miss the forest for the trees. |
