The Ottery
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The Last King of Scotland: Idi Amin and His Merry Band of Pipers

August 11th, 2007

It’s hard to talk about The Last King of Scotland without revealing the ending. Major reviewers haven’t succeeded in remaining spoiler-free with this particular film, and because, in part, I want to respond to them, neither will I. So if you intend to see this movie and want to experience it as a suspense-thriller, then stop reading now.

So, here are the plot-revealing reviewers’ comments that made me interested in, and yet initially wary of, The Last King of Scotland. Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly writes, “The conclusion suggests, quite questionably, that only through the testimony of white men like the doctor could black Ugandans influence world awareness of Amin as a mass murderer.” And, on a similar note, Christianity Today’s Peter Chattaway adds, “In this film. . . a black colleague tells Garrigan he wants to help him escape the country so that he can tell the world what Amin is really like: ‘They will believe you, you are a white man.’ So for all the film’s post-colonial subtext, it does little to challenge the idea that the stories that matter are the ones in which the white man takes centre stage.”

I expected to agree with these assessments and to share the reviewers’ concern that the movie implied that the salvation of Africa lay in the white man’s hands. As much as I admired Hotel Rwanda as a powerful, well-made, well-acted film, I did squirm a little bit at the implication that, if only the white world hadn’t turned its back, things might have been different. No one should ever turn a blind eye to genocide, but never should it boil down to “whites” fixing “black” problems, either. I even worry about this with things like Bono’s crusade against AIDS in Africa and the ONE campaign. I certainly don’t want them to stop, because I think they’re raising awareness to something we all ought to care—and do something—about, but I do wonder sometimes if it just gives us one more excuse to shake our heads at the “Dark Continent” and mutter, “the horror, the horror.”

The Last King of Scotland does certainly have its share of “the horror, the horror” moments, but they mostly occur because the young Scottish doctor Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy, who seems to be in every Oscar-baiting movie released these days) gets himself into genuinely horrifying situations though a combination of his own stupidity, naïvete, arrogance, and carelessness. I had been referring to Last King as a “genocide movie” before I saw it, but we actually see very little of the mass carnage of the Amin regime. All the brutality we see occurs at a more personal level, mostly within Amin’s own cabinet and household.

What’s more, I disagree that the film leaves you with a sense that white men’s testimony is the key to solving Uganda’s problems. If anything, the opposite, because this particular white man is so naïve and inept. When the black Ugandan doctor utters the line, “They will believe you—you are a white man,” it is with utter bitterness and contempt. This doctor risks his life to save Garrigan’s worthless hide, and we’re left thinking that Garrigan has a major personal debt to repay, not just a racial or even national one. (Way more problematic than that line is the fact that two Americans, Forest Whitaker and Kerry Washington, play the two Ugandan characters with the most screen-time. Whitaker does a fabulous job, of course, and I wholeheartedly agree that there need to be more good roles for African American actors–I just wish that directors would cast Africans as Africans more often, though.)

Sure, you could see Garrigan as a stand-in for centuries of whites who have mucked about in Africa and generally made a mess of things. What’s interesting, though, is that Garrigan, in his 1970s optimism and self-styled liberalism, honestly seems to believe that he has more in common with the oppression of black Africans than with the privilege of a white Englishman. “I’m Scottish,” he insists, whenever anyone dares to call him British.

Yes, the film does tell the story of Idi Amin from a white man’s perspective, but I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with that. In fact, I think the “Scottish” angle is a brilliant way to tell one part of Idi Amin’s story (and it’s certainly appropriate for a director who is, after all, Scottish—I’d be more troubled if a Scottish director claimed to be accurately representing the experience of black Africans). Amin’s real, documented obsession with Scotland (he wore kilts and named his sons things like “Cameron” and “Mackenzie”) becomes a way for the film to explore issues of both race and colonialism. In one of the DVD extras, director Kevin Macdonald explains that Scotland represented for Amin an ideal position in relation to England: it had been colonized by the English, but it now had a separate (and, in the 1970s, a growing nationalist) identity. Yet it still benefited economically and politically from being part of Great Britain.

However, does it make a difference that the Scots and the Brits are both viewed as white? Garrigan seems to want to believe it doesn’t make a difference, and early on, Amin seems willing to play this game. As the story progresses, though, you better bet race becomes significant. Garrigan becomes a lot more ready to associate himself with the British when they seem to hold the key to his exit visa. What ultimately allows him to escape? Yes, the sacrifice of the black doctor, but, practically, this opportunity wouldn’t have arisen if it weren’t for Garrigan’s white skin. (He blends into a group of European hostages who are being released.)

Now, the whole hostage situation and its exact timing with Garrigan’s capture and near-death is a little improbable. Even worse on the probability scale is the melodrama that develops when Garrigan begins having an affair with one of Amin’s wives. This whole subplot seems to exist to ratchet up Garrigan’s guilt over the mess he’s made of things, the harm he’s caused to the people he’s supposed to be trying to help (a theme already dealt with quite effectively when he unintentionally causes the death of a fellow Amin adviser). Garrigan gets Kay Amin pregnant, and she asks him to perform an abortion for her before Amin or anyone else finds out. He refuses, she goes to a village doctor, who badly botches the job, she goes to a real hospital, and in the meantime, somehow gets butchered by Amin’s men, who have found out. Now, the last part of this is actually historical fact, though Kay Amin’s affair was with a black doctor, not a white one. But, given Garrigan’s closeness to Idi Amin, it seems improbable that Amin would remain ignorant of the affair—or that he wouldn’t act immediately to kill and/or dismember Garrigan once he knew. Garrigan’s stupidity in the whole business is actually believable, because the film establishes early on that he has overactive hormones and a certain lack of regard for the marital bond. What happens to Kay Amin as a result of Garrigan’s actions may be a symbol for what happened to Africa under European colonialism, but it’s a symbol that fails to work at a simple plot level.

Anyway, I’m certainly glad I’ve seen The Last King of Scotland, because it was thought-provoking, if uneven. Peter Morgan, screenwriter for The Queen, was one of the co-writers for The Last King of Scotland, and I think it’s in part his words that led to Forest Whitaker’s and Helen Mirren’s victorious awards season earlier this year. I’m looking forward to his next work on The Other Boleyn Girl (seriously, what’s up with his royalty trend?) and Frost/Nixon (though, since that’s based on a play, I’m not sure how much he’ll have to do).

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