It's Alright

Rating: 4/10 (30 June 2007)

Less wooden than "Hotel Rwanda", but neither movie really does justice to the nightmare of Africa.
Movie revolves around Dr. Nicholas Garrigan, a young Scotsman who becomes personal doctor to the mass murderer Idi Amin. Evidently, Garrigan is an idiot because he does not perceive the human misery all around him until other people (one of Amin's wives and another doctor) tell him. Furthermore, as Amin's personal doctor, Garrigan is supposed be doing something to improve healthcare for all Uganda, but he seems strangely untroubled by the fact that he never does any of that work. Since we see Uganda mainly through Garrigan's eyes, we only start to feel a bit of the horror of Amin's Uganda towards the end.
Part of the problem is Forest Whitaker. I have seen Whitaker in other movies and he seems to be a sympathetic and likable man, but his performance as Amin is inexplicable until you hear him interviewed in the special features section of the DVD. Whitaker is obviously confused about Amin. I.e., Amin talked of Ugandan, and African, freedom from colonialism, and he was a funny figure, offering aid to England and other such nonsense. At the time, lots of people lapped up that sort of thing. Oh yea, some 80,000 Asians were made destitute by their expulsion from Uganda---and they were the lucky ones since Amin proceeded to ruin the economy, slaughter about 300,000 Ugandans, and terrorize the rest in a decade of butchery.
Maybe some people did not realize the full magnitude of the Ugandan horror, at that time, but Whitaker has no excuse. Listening to Whitaker's sympathetic comments about Amin was quite like listening to someone make excuses for Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot. It is shocking and demoralizing. And, it is also an explanation, I think, for why the movie is missing a lot of the vibrancy it could have had.
I should add that a few other people, both Ugandan and English, who are involved in making the film and who are interviewed in the special features section of the DVD, seem similarly ambivalent about mass murder and the mass murderers who perpetrate it. It is inexplicable. Fortunately, several interviewees do not suffer from this moral blindness, but the damage is done.
A really great movie about Africa remains to be made.