The Doctor and the Dictator

Rating: 8/10 (24 January 2007)

The twentieth century deserves to be remembered by future historians as the Age of the Dictator, but despite the prominent role that dictators played in history, they have not been much in evidence in the cinema. There have been many films about dictatorships, but these have not always focused on the men who led those regimes. Pol Pot, for example, does not appear in "The Killing Fields", nor Galtieri in "La Historia Oficial". Even Adolf Hitler is only a partial exception. Although he has been memorably impersonated on screen by a number of actors from Charlie Chaplin to Bruno Ganz, films about him are less common than one might expect, given that he is the man who has replaced the Devil as our supreme symbol of evil. George C Scott gave a fine impersonation of Mussolini, but this was in a TV series, not a film.
The cinema's lack of interest in dictators is not entirely due to morality- Hollywood has always been happy to make films about fictional villains, or even real-life ones who did not also hold the position of Head of State. A large part of the reason is that many dictators exemplified what Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil". The cold, reserved General Franco bore little resemblance to the idea of the dictator as carpet-chewing maniac. Augusto Pinochet was once described as having the appearance and demeanour of a suburban bank manager. Leonid Brezhnev ruled the world's largest country for nearly two decades ( a period later described as "The Age of Stagnation") but was rarely seen, either in Russia or the West, as anything more than a soulless bureaucrat.
There was, however, nothing banal about Idi Amin, who fascinated the Western media during his time in power. He was noted for his eccentricities, such as awarding himself the Victoria Cross, and the media treated him as a licensed buffoon, which obscured the horrendous nature of his crimes. It has been estimated that during his time in power some 300,000 people were murdered (one hundred times the death toll attributed to his contemporary Pinochet, who at the time was far more widely reviled).
The protagonist of this film (I advisedly do not use the word hero) is Nicholas Garrigan, a young Scottish doctor who, inspired more by desire for adventure than by idealism, takes a position working in a medical mission in Uganda. (The alternative, working as a family GP in his father's practice, does not appeal to him). A chance meeting with Amin leads to his being offered the post of personal physician to the President. The main reason for Amin's choice seems to be that Garrigan is a Scot; the dictator had a fascination for all things Scottish, including wearing a kilt and (despite his Muslim religion) drinking whisky. The title of the film derives from the fact that he even offered his services as King Idi I of Scotland, an offer which the Scots, for some reason, declined.
A strange friendship grows up between the doctor and the dictator, and Garrigan soon finds that he is being treated as Amin's confidant and adviser as well as physician. As portrayed by James McAvoy, Garrigan is in many ways an unattractive character- flattered at being singled out for attention by a powerful man, blinded by a credulous belief in Amin's good intentions and eager for the luxurious lifestyle which his position bestows upon him, he turns a blind eye to the mounting evidence of the atrocities being committed by the regime. His only excuse is that he is young and naive. He is also a casual philanderer; in the course of the film he seduces a Ugandan girl he meets on a bus, Sarah, the neglected wife of the mission director and (incredibly) Kay, one of Amin's three wives. To cuckold one's employer is never a good career move; to do it to a man as unpredictable as Amin is a positively bad one, as Nicholas soon finds out.
Apart from McAvoy, there are also good performances from Gillian Anderson as Sarah, David Oyewolo as the brave and principled Ugandan doctor Junju (the one man in the film who can be described as a hero) and from Simon McBurney as the callous and hypocritical British diplomat Nigel Stone. (There is an implication- which may be justified- that the British Government initially supported Amin's seizure of power, seeing him as more pro-Western than his predecessor Milton Obote, and then turned against him, not because he was a tyrant but because he proved to be less malleable than they had hoped).
The film, however, is dominated by Forest Whitaker, who well deserves his Oscar nomination. I have been an admirer of his ever since "The Crying Game" (a film I did not otherwise much care for), and here he is superb as Amin. Whitaker avoids the mistake of trying to make his character purely evil. Amin initially enjoyed considerable support from Ugandans sickened by the corrupt regime of Obote, the sort of Socialist who believed in the redistribution of wealth, chiefly into his own bank account. The dictator we see in the early scenes is a great bear of a man, shrewd, jovial and with a good deal of personal charm and a well-developed, if occasionally childish, sense of humour. Whitaker's interpretation leaves open the possibility that Amin was a sincere man corrupted by the temptations of power and that Garrigan's naive trust was not altogether misplaced. It is precisely because Whitaker's Amin initially appears so affable that the raging, half-mad figure we see at the end of the film is so frightening. An unpredictable man can be more dangerous than one who is predictably wicked. The film works well as a study of the politics of dictatorship and of the relationship between two very different men. 8/10