They should have got Gauteng Premier Mbhazima Shilowa to play Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland.
Shilowa at least has the seductive/menacing looks of the fleshy African power-man that Amin became. Forest — the names some mothers give them! — Whitaker, looking slightly slimmer than he was when I last saw him on screen, unfortunately still just looks like a fat black man from the Louisiana plantations, trying to pull off the fiendishly deceptive subtleties of a northern Ugandan accent (rather than a generalised “African” one), stirring in the body language that goes with it, and topping off both with an internal profile of a once easy-going, ex-King’s African Rifles sergeant gone bonkers on the heady adrenalin of power.
To tell the truth, it took a little more than that to turn Amin into the celebrated monster that he became. Very few darkies escaped going a little mad under their unexplainable colonial domination by a handful of Europeans in khaki shorts. Dignity and self-respect went out the window for several generations.
In Amin’s case, all this was compounded by being simultaneously praised by his white masters for being a merciless, no-questions-asked killing machine in the British army’s losing war against the Mau Mau in neighbouring Kenya, and jeered and hit over the head with an iron bar by the same squaddies to encourage him to punch more fiercely in the boxing ring.
It is a wonder, given all this, that Amin had any time for white people at all. In reality, of course, he didn’t.
Contrary to carefully manipulated appearances, the man was not an idiot. When the worm turned, it did so in a slow and calculating way. He first played along with the British-Israeli plot to overthrow his boss and mentor, President Milton Obote, installing himself as president of Uganda. Then he gradually began to bare his teeth, sometimes with a disarming charm that fooled his handlers into thinking he actually liked them (vanity is an incorrigible Western failing, as you will recall,) and then with increasing effectiveness as he turned from army clown to would-be conqueror of the British Empire, and vengeful knight in armour for the restoration of African dignity.
It all went awry, of course, and the greatest victims became those among his own people who couldn’t quite see eye-to-eye with his increasingly crazy vision, and had to be brutally eliminated as a result: some 300Â 000 black Ugandans at the final tally.
The Hollywood adaptation of Giles Foden’s novel, also called The Last King of Scotland, gives Whitaker very little of this background to work with. The film’s emphasis is on the Boy’s Own, coming-of-age African capers of a fictional young Scottish doctor, Nicholas Garrigan, played by the wide-eyed, good-looking actor James McAvoy. This is really the central character in the movie, and the whole of the story unfolds from his perspective.
Nevertheless, the Academy, in its wisdom, chose to give its best actor Oscar to Whitaker, in reward for services rendered to the cause of Hollywood’s take on the world.
But Hollywood is, thankfully, an inconsistent beast. The best actress gong went to the seasoned British trooper Helen Mirren for her portrayal of reigning monarch Elizabeth II in The Queen and a well- deserved accolade it was, too.
The Queen does almost the opposite of what The Last King of Scotland sets out to achieve. Rather than waiting for the protagonist to be dead and gone (and therefore unable to set the record straight, as Amin might have wanted to do) it has the audacity to knit together what little is known of the goings-on behind the stony facades of Buckingham Palace, 10 Downing Street and Balmoral Castle, to produce an intelligently fictionalised account of an extraordinary shift of power, from stiff-upper-lip traditionalism to Blairite punk populism in the present-day workings of British politics. It all has a brilliantly executed ring of truth about it.
Mirren manages to make the Queen look like a human person. The stiff hair, the bad hats and dresses, and the po face of the real Queen that we all know from the television are all there. But her performance goes beyond that. The reluctant queen is revealed to have moments of humour and vulnerability. She is constantly aware of her relations with those around her — the rusty officers of her court, relics of a bygone age; her personal private secretary; the upstart prime minister himself; and, above all, her awkward, almost embarrassed interactions with the hundreds of domestic servants who keep her various households ticking over.
Mirren shows us the steady dawning of the lady’s realisation that nothing will ever be the same again, and she will have to somehow find the inner strength to deal with it. And the film reminds us that it all began with the scandal and tragedy surrounding the rise and fall of that other, more unfortunate upstart, Lady Diana, Princess of Wales.
Hollywood, as I say, is mercifully inconsistent. On the one hand it doffs its cap to the ongoing fascination it has with British royalty, the institution that its forefathers went to such bloody lengths to put in its place during the American revolution of 1776. On the other, it pats itself on the back for continuing the legacy of the untrustworthy Negro buffoon, first introduced to the movie screen by the 1930s slapstick character Steppin’ Fetchit.
The Queen of England gains a new lease of life, and an unexpected, though qualified, measure of sympathy and understanding. The would-be King of Scotland is buried under the ongoing myth and innuendo of the irredeemable native cannibal.