The Last King of Scotland

This was a highly regarded movie that I should have been eager to see once it hit cable but due to the subject matter, the brutally insane Ethiopian dictator Idi Amin, I was reluctant. Despite giving The Last King of Scotland a 4, which is pretty rare for me, my misgivings were correct.

The film filters our view of Amin through a young Scottish doctor (played by the terrific James MacAvoy) who sees a few years working at a clinic in the boonies of Ethiopia as a lark and an escape from his dour, domineering physician father. Unfortunately for him he meets up with Amin (Forrest Whittaker, who won last year’s Best Actor Oscar) in the days after the 1970 coup that bought him to power and Amin, who was after all literally insane, saw something he liked. Not knowing any better Garrigan reluctantly accepts an offer to be the President’s personal physician.

Up close he learns the truth, never more clearly than the time he gets back to his apartment to find it tossed over and his UK passport gone, replaced with a Ugandan one. Amin never asks permission for anything and always assumes everyone wants whatever he wishes to give them; his reign was brief–though not brief enough for the more than 300,000 countrymen killed in those nine years–as even the strongest supporters were unable to stomach the man’s increasingly horrific behavior.

Kerry Washington (Ray), David Oyewolo (who was also excellent in HBO’s 5 Days and BBC import series MI-5) and Simon McBurney (Golden Compass) have key supporting roles while Gillian Anderson, demonstrating the freedom starring in a TV series for 10 year can give an actor, has a nice cameo as the frustrated, sexy wife of Garrigan’s clinic superior.

I think part of my attitude has to do with the way director Kevin Macdonald and writers Peter Morgan and Jeremy Brock slowly remove the veil from Garrigan’s eyes. At first (like many others) he thinks Amin is a strong man of the people who can root out the corruption of the previous regime, which is why the doctor decides to take the job offer, and LKoS has may laugh-provoking scenes. Even after many others have come to see the truth he still doesn’t. Finally the truth slaps him in the face, at which point he barely escapes with his life and even that costs a friend his life.

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