It’s hard to know quite how to take The Last King of Scotland. Not that it isn’t a good movie — it is excellent. In fact, were it a bad movie it wouldn’t matter that it leaves one with unanswered questions about its intention and meaning. It would be possible simply to dismiss it.
Based on Giles Foden’s novel, the movie inserts a fictional character into an historical reality. The fictional person is freshly qualified medical doctor Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy), and the world he enters is the 1970s Uganda of Idi Amin’s dictatorship. Nicholas is idealistic but also a bit of a rake, and the larger-than-life Amin exerts a powerful spell over him. What follows is, of course, disillusionment and danger as Amin descends from liberator of his people to blood-drenched tyrant.
The movie is riveting from start to finish, darkly funny, deeply involving — and deeply troubling. Perhaps this is the response of a South African wary of accusations of ”Afro-pessimism”, and the way Amin became simply the most cartoonish emblem of African dictatorship (though Jean-Bédel Bokassa had more bling and Mobutu Sese Seko had better hats, as well as greater longevity as ruler). It’s easy to see here a sort of crass Heart of Darkness scenario, with Amin as exemplar of a specially horrible, savage Africa.
Which is not to say he wasn’t a bad guy, or that Europe didn’t produce its share of Caligulas, Henry VIIIs, Hitlers and Stalins. Maybe it’s that we’re pulled, as Nicholas is, into the vortex of untrammelled power — half-seduced by it, and fascinated even while appalled. Foden has written that for him the story is about ”culpable passivity”, as represented by Nicholas.
In The Last King of Scotland, Africa (in the form of Amin) seems to stand for Europe’s bad conscience, though I’m not sure that makes one feel any better. And maybe one should see questions like ”But what does it mean?” as unnecessary: it can be salutary to be faced with a film that unsettles one’s moral sense, especially when most movies gesture self-righteously towards a morality that is in fact entirely pre-digested.
At any rate, The Last King of Scotland (a title Amin gave himself at one point) should be seen because it is very good, with a bravura performance from Forest Whitaker as Amin, and one of appealing subtlety from McAvoy. If it’s depressing and disturbing, perhaps that’s as it should be.