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Saw The Last King of Scotland, starring Forrest Whittaker as Idi Amin (and winning him the Golden Globe the other night).
It is a powerful performance by Whittaker. I've said in the past the actors playing real people start out at something of a disadvantage for me, but it helps that other than pictures I have absolutely no idea how Amin sounds when he talked, how he walked, or anything else about him.
But still, I handicap him a bit for it compared to other great performances last year where the actor had to create the character out of whole cloth.
It is a very interesting story. The post-colonial '60s and '70s are just generally interesting times, historically speaking, and the repercussions continue with us to this day.
But, for me, the films fatal flaw is something I mentioned when discussing Blood Diamond. That is the tendency to require that the problems of Africa be filtered through white eyes. It is inherited from the novel on which it is based, but the movie's protagonist is a fictional character (a Scottish doctor who serendipitously falls into Amin's favor) set among real events (though seemingly time compressed).
In the end, per the movie (which opens with the "based on real events" title) it is this white doctor who eventually escapes Uganda to reveal to the world what a horrible man Amin was (as opposed to the eccentric buffoon most thought him). This is something of a slap in the face to Henry Kyemba, Amin's black health minister who managed to defect and did all the revealing in his 1977 book A State of Blood.
I finally went to see the movie based on a strong recommendation from a friend. I've now talked a bit more with him and he had no idea that the main character is entirely fictional. He assumed that the movie was based on the man's memoir, not an award winning piece of fiction.
Finally, I have another gripe about the main character. He is presented as too much of a rube, beguiled by Amin's charm and completely unaware of the atrocities until sudden revelation and escape. So not only do we filter the story through the eyes of a white observer but we make him pure as well (pure through naivety rather than goodness, but nonetheless). To the extent that there was a real "Nicholas Garrigan" it was a white British military officer who gained Amin's trust and was much more complicit in the atrocities.
So, my final conclusion is: powerfully acted, slightly morally bankrupt, and victim to certain ugly tendencies in the Western view of Africa (it only matters if white people are involved).
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