The Last King Of Scotland

It's no surprise Forrest Whitaker won an Oscar for his powerhouse performance as Idi Amin in Kevin MacDonald's The Last King of Scotland. It's the mesmerizing heart of a film that perfectly encapsulates what was and still might be Britain's naive political approach towards Africa.

James McAvoy plays Nicholas Garrigan, the idealistic Scottish doctor whose secondment at a rural hospital in Africa takes a bizarre turn when he befriends and then becomes official advisor to the infamous dictator Amin. What is initially the adventure he has been craving, becomes a nightmare as Amin slowly succumbs to insanity and murderous rage.

MacDonald does the right thing in playing down the aesthetic and allowing the actors to take centre stage. The beauty and primacy of Africa is already established, what this film attempts to show, just as Hotel Rwanda did, is that amid this beauty and adventure there were acts of horrific and unrestrained brutality being committed, and it is in the innocent exuberance of the fictional Nicholas and the haughty civil servants in Uganda that we see how deeply simplistic our grasp of these events were. It's rather a sobering reminder of the recent faltering dealings Britain has had with Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe.

Nicholas seeks adventure and an escape from the comfortable boredom of his father's practice back in Scotland and feels he has found it in the arms of the charming and energetic leadership of Amin. In those early scenes it is not hard to see why he would be seduced, as Whitaker bounds across the frame like a baby lion, seemingly the superhuman saviour of a beleaguered nation. Of course, as the world well knows, this was not the case, and just as Nicholas is becoming comfortable with all the pomp that comes with his new father figure, the troubling news of the many disappearances starts to slip through, even more so as Nicholas might have had a hand in one of them.

It's certainly not a film without flaws and though MacDonald maintains a nice period, grainy look to the film and subtly communicates the majority of horror through his actors rather than glorifying it as simply spectacle, there are dips into melodrama. These dips almost jeopardise the wonderful performance by Whitaker as the screen fills with scattered images of his descent into madness almost as if he were aping Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now. It interrupts the nuanced flow from gregarious charmer to paranoid, and child-like, horror.

The final torture scene seems gratuitous and frankly absurd especially as it mixes with the very real events of the Air France hijacking by Palestinian terrorists. It's almost as if MacDonald wants to say so much more about Amin's religious ties and yet is hampered by his own fictional creation and the need to produce some closure. A shame he couldn't have been as brave as Whitaker's performance.