Sherry Chandler » The Last King of Scotland
The Last King of Scotland
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.
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4 Comments
1. Harry replies at 1st March 2008, 11:33 am :
“What was the take-home message of this searing confrontation with the Other?”
That Scottishness is a pathology?
2. sherry replies at 1st March 2008, 7:39 pm :
I’ll tell you what, Harry. I’ve spent the winter escaping, if you can call it that, into Ian Rankin novels and I am left in no condition to refute the notion that Scottishness is a pathology.
3. MSW replies at 2nd March 2008, 8:21 pm :
On further thought, perhaps there isn’t really a moral, as such. Except for the idea that nothing is black and white. Amin, for all that so much of what he did was monstrous, was also a human being, with the capacity to charm others. And Carrigan, this young, rich white boy, who talks about wanting to do something to help Africa, does not turn out to be a grand hero like the conventional narrative would have him do. Both are human, both are flawed, and maybe it’s as much an invitation to consider that there are no easy answers, and that we, who sit in judgment of men like Amin, are not perfect, either.
But I’m not offering this, or my previous answer, as anything definite, either. I don’t know enough about the man, or the time, to really say.
4. sherry replies at 4th March 2008, 10:45 am :
I agree, MSW, that Amin is presented by this film as fully human and so as complex. That’s part of what makes him so frightening. Were he a mere buffoon it would be easier to dismiss him.
And of course it takes more than one man to make a tyrant. As Harry Rutherford remarks about Joe Stalin:
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