remarkably, if the search i just did is reliable (it didn’t look very reliable), no one has posted on this yet. we just saw it, at the theatre no less, and it was a well well spent $9 (it’s a cheapo theatre). forest whitaker is, of course, fantastic (did he win an oscar? i can’t remember and i don’t feel like checking); but it’s not just him. the whole cast is really good, gillian anderson is there only long enough for us to appreciate how good her english accent is and how damn beautiful she is, and james mcavoy, whom i had never seen before, looks a bit like russel crowe and is very attractive indeed. i don’t know any of the african (or meant-to-be-african) actors, but i really thought the ensemble was most effective. this is, however, indisputably, whitaker’s film. what an actor.
well, you know the story. idi amin is a smart, funny, charming man who’s also a brutal murderer and paronoid dictator. he makes friends with charming little doctor nicholas garrigan, fresh out of med school and on an african jaunt, who happens to be… scottish! amin has a real thing for scotland. beats me why, but he really loves the place. so he and garrigan really hit it off, because at heart they are both big boys into palling about.
what’s really cool, besides whitaker, is that, instead of this being one of those euro-american films in which earnest white people go to africa to save the planet — and earnest white directors tell us all there is to know about what’s really going on in africa, which is a-lot-of-black-people-being-exploited-and-killed-while-white-people-profit –, this is a european film in which a british director looks at the insidious ways in which white people ride the waves of post-colonial catastrophes while africans get socked in the teeth. this is a white man’s look at white man’s ignorant and/or willful exploitation of military instability and the expendability of whole populations. ugandans get massacred? who cares, pass the whiskey. thankfully, there is not an ounce of post-post-colonial condescension, that i could see. in all his paranoia and madness, amin is treated with respect. he’s a psychopathic sonofabitch, but he’s far from stupid. he knows what’s going on a lot better than little nicholas garrigan, who, in his criminal innocence, gets a lot of people hurt.
it’s worth seeing the real Amin, who comes off as a pathologically self-absorbed sly buffoon who does not necessarily know the names of his own children, in Barbet Schroeder’s documentary from the 1970s, whose name escapes me but just might be simply Idi Amin. The best scene occurs with Amin’s cabinet who dare not interrupt his tedious tirade; three weeks later one minister’s body is found in a canal, the very minister denounced as incompetent at the meeting. Another good scene is Amin’s military “operations” in preparation to invade Israel.
Idi Amin Dada–yeah, Schroeder’s doc is outstanding.
I really enjoyed ‘Last King of Scotland.’ I watched it, expecting to focus on the performances, and they were good. But what surprised me was how enthralling the movie is. It is a nail-biter. Since there is no mention of Nicholas Garrigan over the credits (in the “where are they now” sequence), I assume he is entirely fictional. It is a neat narrative device to tell the story of Amin. Amin is viewed through Western, white eyes, but it is true, as Gio says, that the lead Westerner is portrayed as weak and shallow.
Here is a link to an interview with Giles Foden, whose book is the basis for the film. Garrigan is fictional but it is based on a real character. In the movie, Garrigan is told by a British diplomat that he is known as “Amin’s white monkey.” The real character was known as “Amin’s white rat.”
http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/1298/foden/interview.html
the decision to change “rat” to “monkey” deserves a thread all by itself!
catching up slowly on all the discussions of films we’ve recently seen, and it seems as though sunhee and i are doomed to be dissenting voices on all of them. we didn’t dislike this but found it to be completely ordinary.
i appreciate gio’s take on it as “a european film in which a british director looks at the insidious ways in which white people ride the waves of post-colonial catastrophes while africans get socked in the teeth” but it didn’t quite work for me. the doctor is presented finally as a naif rather as corrupt–which was apparently not the case for the real life people who the composite in the book and film was based on. how exactly does garrigan not know anything about what goes on in uganda? does he never leave the grounds of amin’s palace? does he never read a paper?
more interesting to me would have been a little more attention to the story of the black doctor who dies saving garrigan. why should garrigan be saved anyway? this remains for me in the genre of european films in which africa is nothing more than a site for exploration of european guilt.
and it escapes me why forest whitaker’s performance in this film is supposed to be so excellent. because he does a ugandan accent?
“how exactly does garrigan not know anything about what goes on in uganda? does he never leave the grounds of amin’s palace? does he never read a paper?”
the same way most americans think, at this point in time, that bush is a decent but incapable man who made a series of mistakes in good faith. self-deception is an incredibly powerful tool.
“this remains for me in the genre of european films in which africa is nothing more than a site for exploration of european guilt.”
maybe so, but this time at least such guilt is exposed by guilty characters, not by well-meaning contemporary westerners tortured by superior understanding.
you didn’t find forest whitaker impressive? his amin seemed very powerful to me… very alive, very intelligent, simultaneously charismatic, sympathetic, and abhorrent.
the same way most americans think, at this point in time, that bush is a decent but incapable man who made a series of mistakes in good faith. self-deception is an incredibly powerful tool.
why should a film about uganda function as a metaphor for american apathy about american politics? and in any case, for this character it is not actually possible to avoid this knowledge in the way that it is possible for most americans (or anyone for that matter) to be ignorant about what is happening in africa. it’s not like he’s some random dude going about his business–he’s amin’s doctor and confidante; he’s driving around the city, he’s having sex with amin’s jr. wife who is telling him everything about amin–so why does he remain naive? why is it important to preserve some amount of audience sympathy for him? why does he get to escape?
no no, i only meant that it is very easy — surprisingly easy — to remain ignorant of the machinations of power and the dealings in horror that happen under your eyes, especially if you have a lot to gain from this ignorance. i don’t find that surprising that way you do, ‘nab, not at all. back to bush, look not only at the american people, but also at american politicians who, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary and supposedly direct access to direct proofs, still believed that saddam hussein had weapons of mass destruction (colin powell?). i’m not saying that this is a movie about america (though, why not?). i’m saying that the case of america and bush should be evidence enough that gross self-deception is all too easy.
i don’t know why the film spared garrigan. i felt no sympathy for him, but i can’t remember now if the film encouraged us to feel sp,e. maybe that he was spared is a commentary on the fact that, when all is said and done, the white people — the europeans, the americans — land on their feet, while the colonial subjects (ugandan doctor) suck the bitter juices?
gio, the idea that idi amin’s doctor/confidante and the average american citizen is in the same position when it comes to not knowing what is going on in the society around them seems a little specious to me. i don’t think americans are self-deceived about bush, they have a lot of smoke being blown at them; uganda under amin wasn’t exactly a tranquil society on the surface. the film tends to blur timelines–4 years elapsed between the expulsion of indians from uganda and entebbe; don’t you think the character might have had some opportunity in that time to look around him? he seemed quite shaken by amin’s decision to throw the indians out.
the thriller style ending of the film is all about whether garrigan will be able to get away. his failed attempt to kill amin, his act of conscience in saving the boy who is almost made to eat the poison (thus giving himself away)–i’d say all of this is intended to redeem the character; as is the scene on the plane when it takes off.
interestingly, in real life at least one of the people the character was based on did not get away. nor did he renounce amin. see here. don’t you think this would make for a more complex film, which might get at the question of european involvement in neocolonial africa somewhat more messily?
arnab, if i were reynolds i’d spin a tale about how the western viewer is implicated in the colonial attitude by his/her desire to see garrigan safe and away. but i am no reynolds, and you are complicating the film for me in a way that makes me like it a bit less, especially when you say that “in real life at least one of the people the character was based on did not get away. nor did he renounce amin.” i must however say that i have been deeply angered by every western film about africa i have seen thus far (i have not yet seen blood diamond, but i fully expect to be angered by it), and not at all angered by this, so, unless my brain went to sleep on that day, it must have done something right.
colin powell is not the average american. being obsessed with politics, i talk to much-less-than-average americans all the time, and many of them still think that bush is an incompetent but sincere leader. i’m just sayin’.
in any case, i think i am echoing you when i say that it would be good if american distributors paid more attention to films about africa made by africans.
gio, not to belabour this, but for colin powell and other politicians of various political persuasions, i suspect it isn’t actually self-deception at work as much as a cynical political calculation of plausible deniability. in the film, however, garrigan is presented as actually not knowing what is going on around him. he is genuinely blind to the depredations of amin, in a way that is more implausible than some ugandans (or americans) ignoring the worst of amin (or bush) and finding some way to absolve him.
also, it is worth remembering that just as in reality bob astles did not get away in the way that garrigan did, and that he was very far from a naive innocent caught up in excited self-delusion, similarly in reality it was not the narrative of a white man that blew the whistle on what was happening inside uganda (as the doctor says will happen to garrigan when explaining why he’s helping him get away); it was a book written by a ugandan politician in exile. in this sense, i would argue the film is further returning the white first-worlder to a kind of centrality in the narrative of redemption while removing him from the narrative of true culpability.
Can’t wrangle with Arnab’s last line in post 12, and I’m probably with him more on this one–I didn’t dislike it, nor did I find it terribly involving.
If I were Reynolds I might note that the movie at the least does some complicating around the singular “the” article in front of “colonial attitude”: Garrigan’s Scottishness is at least acknowledged, and circling around a few scenes are some intriguing suggestions of the multiple hierarchies of diaspora and identity, as Indian tailors fit G for a suit while a Brit embassy bigwig signals his pleasure with Amin (and ignores the tailors) and outside one of Obote’s soldiers is grabbed and manhandled away. But I wouldn’t push on this too far–there’s complexity in the context, but if you’re unfamiliar with the context or history I assume you could not really know your vision is being complicated.
And the first direct run-in with Amin (Whitaker) seems formally suspect: we keep cutting between Garrigan’s nervous but excited face, close-ups of the flaring nostrils on the lowing, distressed cow, and close-ups of the flaring nostrils on Amin’s angry face. I might push on the film as much for its formal conventions, where the African “background” is quite generically used. Crowd shots, cuts of running children, a blank similarity to the crowds and most of the characters. Its narrative conventions, criticized by A. C., are complemented I think forcefully by its formal touches.
And here’s where I might draw some distinctions with other films, in regard to similar debates on other threads. The complications of form in Children seem to me to establish a dialectic where foreground and background keep shifting places, where apathetic individualism becomes complicit or culpable behavior. I’m not sure how I’d read the formal and narrative complications of Constant Gardener, but it too seems to me more intriguing, more disjunctive in its formal and emplotted structures, than Last King.
I might even go back and question my admiration for the documentary Idi Amin Dada–it’s been a long while since I’ve seen it, and it has the benefit of being centered on Amin… yet its gaze, its attention to its “subject” (or object?) may be worth re-examining.
I guess I didn’t dislike this film. But it seemed very familiar. I think I might prefer the novel–there were many hints around character that I’d love to have had more time to examine and explore. (And Whitaker was fine. Amin’s a big meal of a role, so… he did it well, but I prefer the small-detail Whitaker of Crying Game. I did really like McAvoy, though.
arnab, what ugandan politician in exile blew the whistle on amin’s atrocities? was he the first to bring this to world attention? no tv, no radio, no newspapers? have you read his book?
i haven’t read foden’s book. is this the book you guys are referring to? foden is english, no?
gio, the politician in question was henry kyemba, who wrote the book state of blood while in exile in england–which apparently got a lot of international acclaim. you’ll never guess what position he held from the time amin came to power till the time he fled five years later: yes, minister of health. in the film, the minister of health is similarly credited as a man of conscience who is actually trying to help the people of uganda, but of course the film does away with him so that garrigan can be the potential whistle-blower. oh, and it is worth adding that kyemba was no angel himself–he only seems to have developed a conscience when amin turned on him as well; he apparently could have defected much earlier.
by the way, i don’t mean to suggest that i’ve read the book or know so very much about ugandan history–this is mostly based on a few hours of tooling around the web.
and i agree with mike about the lower-key whitaker, who is always excellent (also in smoke).
This is not a movie about Africa, or even about Amin. It is a movie about Garrigan. That may be a pity, but it still deserves to be evaluated on those terms. It is quite different from Constant Gardener (which I also thought was excellent) and Blood Diamond (which was not) in that Garrigan is obviously not a hero in any ordinary sense of the world, and is not sent to save Africa from itself (a recurrent trope in many movies, which, I agree, is offensive).
The character of Garrigan is an unusual one, and I’m not sure if I can think of an equivalent role in recent times. He goes to Uganda, not to help Ugandans, but because he is bored with a stifling life at home. He beds anyone who comes near. He has an aggressive Scottishness (and the early 1970s were the peak period of Scottish nationalism). He claims, in an undergraduate kind of way, to be opposed to European colonialism, and clearly enjoys dressing down the British Embassy official early on, but he clearly knows nothing about the country or its history: he is striking a political pose. He is entranced by the proximity to power and Mercedes convertibles and Amin’s charisma (and I think Whitaker does a great job of cycling through humor, menace and insanity), and lets himself be convinced that he can do more good as Amin’s personal physician. He is weak, self-centered, and completely out of his depth. The movie is ambivalent about whether he knows full well what will happen to the Minister of Health after he shops him to Amin, but he clearly knows something will happen to him.
McAvoy gives us someone who is neither savior nor obviously evil. He is simply complicit. That is far more interesting than either of the alternatives, and describes a much larger proportion of the Western population. And I’m not as certain as Arnab that Garrigan must have known what is going on. Part of the answer depends on how long the time period covered by the movie is (months, years?) and I cannot remember the start date. But it is quite conceivable that Garrigan, who rarely leaves the palace grounds, and has no social circle outside of the President’s, could have been oblivious to the worst of it. Amin’s wife (a truly horrible plot device) tells him about horrible things, but does not give any details. So overall, I liked the movie because of the complexity and nuance of Garrigan’s character.
I notice that there is a new Joseph Fiennes movie called Goodbye Bafana about how the white jailer of Nelson Mandela learns to love a free and multiracial South Africa. Now that is offensive.
the film seems to begin with amin’s rise to power and ends with entebbe. it includes the expulsion of asians, which happened in 1972 and entebbe, which happened in 1976. i do like your reading, though i don’t find it entirely convincing.
Four years… OK so no excuse for Garrigan’s ignorance. But then it did take the American people six years to figure out Bush.
Who’s Bush?
The author of the novel–Giles Foden–was born in England but grew up in Malawi, and all of his novels have centered in collisions between various African and European or American identities. I haven’t read it, but I have heard some quite strong acclaim for all of his writing.
YOU HAVEN’T READ IT??? are you all right, mike? wanna talk to your trusty ol’ buddy gio?
I wanted to like this film a lot more than I did, but I was compelled to finish it. It certainly held my interest from beginning to end. Whitaker and McAvoy are both very good and the film has a kind of “seventies cinema” vibe to it (formally speaking). I had a problem with representations of African women in particular but Africans in general; they come across as irrational, hyper-violent, hyper-sexual and under-educated (gross stereotypes all). I will agree with Mike that the film works to complicate some of these problematic representations but mostly I found it luridly inviting. I felt a bit complicit watching the damn thing to be honest. It was thrilling in all the wrong ways.
really? so negative, jeff?
wasn’t the sexuality evenly distributed, race-wise? am i remembering the film all wrong?
I guess the thrill was all the decadence (sexual, violent, political) on display. Amin’s regime reminded me of some kind of Hugh Hefner Playboy mansion gone terribly awry. And Amin, even at his worst, is seductive and charismatic, the camera sweeping in and out of close ups as Whitaker sucks up all of the space in the frame. I would say the white female doctor working for the “good of the people” comes across as far more appealing and oh-so-out-of-reach than any African woman in the film. Even the sympathetic fifth wife of Amin can’t seem to keep her pants on even in the shadow of the devil. So, while the film does work to complicate a certain kind of Western liberal post-colonial narrative (you know, the one where the white man learns an important lesson, perhaps even sacrificing himself in the name of Boy Scout idealism and/or global corporate responsibility), I think it gives us white westerners exactly the kind of picture of Africa the majority appears to want to see. Those people are crazy! We should all thank the heavens for European colonialism/imperialism or these savages would have obliterated themselves centuries ago! And other insidious thoughts like that.
oh, but i thought this was exactly what this film wasn’t doing! the original doctor’s wife seems to me the kind of benevolent white person who doesn’t engage with the local population on equal terms that we see in films like, say, the constant gardener. so i was happy she was soon set aside. what seems to me the latest predominant stereotype of african people is not of their being crazy but of their being stupid and helpless.
these africans are not stupid. their “craziness” (but is idi amin a lot more crazy in his blood-thirstyness that, say, bush? i keep returning to this comparison…) is political bankruptcy, greed gone amok — in the film, amin is certainly more intelligent and less “crazy” than he at first seems. it’s all right that he’s not unsympathetic, i think. he is a tri-dimentional character. there’s tragedy to the man.
this is a picture of an african country whose complexity i, for one, don’t often get to see at all in the movies. there seems to be more complexity to this picture than to about any picture i can think of in which a dictator, western or non-western, is portrayed. the black and white of the representation (in both senses) gives way to a much more nuanced sharing of responsibility.
yes, idi amin was a lot crazier than bush.
in any case, what complexity do you see in amin in this film?
are there any noteworthy films about Africa/African-made that do not center on corruption and chaos? as a recent convert to African music, I think it would be nice to see a film that showed the complexity of a society like the Congo that could produce political chaos, yes, but also a remarkable musician like Franco. I think it would be a major revelation to many Americans that Africa has a thriving popular culture that doesn’t have anything immediately to do with our entertainment industry. Unfortunately–as we discussed in detail elsewhere–Africans are always depicted as an undifferentiated mass, against which the white European/American protagonist learns, evolves, comes to a realization, etc. One wonders at the lack of imagination that requires a film maker, however well-intentioned, to adopt a british novel about 1970s Uganda, rather than confronting contemporary African reality in a significant way. But that’s perhaps unfair. However, like most recent American political films, the political films concerning Africa are always set in the past, as though politics only arises from a consideration of the past. Apparently there is no politics of the present. I wait for the bloodblath in the Sudan to become suitably blurry so that a definitive film can spring forth, starring Matt Damon as the tortured UN official who cannot save that charming black family. I find suspect a bit the current hand-wringing over “child soldiers” in Africa–as though somehow all the bloodletting in the wake of colonialism would be bearable if it just didn’t involve pre-adolescents. It’s like the childhood AIDS thing–an implicit recognition that somehow the adults are beyond/not worth saving and we can only work up the compassion sufficiently when we see wide-eyed urchins involved. Does it have something to do, too, with the infantilization of Africa generally? The self-congratulation about the Kimberley Process regarding “conflict diamonds” is a bit strange, too. So all inequality in the relationship between diamond merchants and diamond workers has all been settled–wow! Those who find the diamonds will now be living as well as the DeBeers executives? Africa will now fully take part in the Wealth of Nations? In any case I’d love to hear about films that break this pattern of white hero/black victim.