Sherry Chandler

Watching The Last King of Scotland was as painful as I’d feared it would be. It’s taken me months to screw my courage to sticking. After all, we’re living through terror(ism) enough, without my having to invite it to my living room.

But oh! the horrible power of Forest Whitaker’s performance as Idi Amin.

It was this performance I wanted to see. I’ve admired Whitaker’s work since The Crying Game and even Smoke.

He did not disappoint.

And there was a gem of a role for Gillian Anderson as a woman who, tempted, refuses to fall.

What was the take-home message of this searing confrontation with the Other?

Hubby says don’t get sucked in by charm and grand charisma.

Son says don’t go to Africa to play the White Man.

Me? I don’t regret having seen it, though it’s left a small scar on my psyche, but I don’t know the moral of the story.

I felt maybe a little set up by the movie. Our protagonist, Dr. Nicholas Carrigan, is maybe unbelievably stupid and naïve, though he does possibly have an ego big enough to match Amin’s. (A blindly stupid white man with a huge ego and a love for the trappings of power. Nah. Not realistic at all.)

Carrigan’s character is so ugly, selfish, using, and one-dimensional that it begs to be reduced to allegory. Perhaps James McAvoy had spent too much time playing fauns in C. S. Lewis country?

So maybe the take-home message is simply don’t f*ck Idi Amin’s wife, ya stupid, arrogant goit.

Which, if you think about it, is a moral that encapsulates both the others.

As Whitaker’s Amin said, Amin/Uganda/Africa is not a joke. Unless Amin is making the joke.

Maybe it’s enough that Whitaker gives us a look at the complexity, the charm, the frightening human face of evil.

The performance begs to be called a look into the heart of darkness, because, in the Conradian sense, the term is appropriate. But it’s also a phrase become hackneyed and stale that has been used by any number of reviewers about this film, so I won’t say it.