A good book spoiled

Rating: 6/10 (22 October 2009)

Maybe it's a mistake to see an adaptation of a book if you've already read the novel. Giles Fodden's 'The Last King of Scotland' was so very good - and I liked it for its three insights: into the real, tragic history of Uganda; into the man-child madman who was Idi Amin; and into the (imaginary) mindset of a Scottish doctor whose entanglement with Amin is the basis of the story. Unfortuantly, Kevin MacDonald's film, while superficially broadly true to the book, loses all of its main qualities. The plot is simplified, partly (I guess) for length, but also, I fear, to provide more of what I might call "Hollywood moments". Nowhere in the book does Amin personally attempt to murder the doctor in public, for example; indeed, I came to dread hearing the film's score, because whenever music started in the background, it was normally to accompany an action sequence that was that little bit more simplistic than anything in the novel. And it's not as if there wasn't plenty of action in the book to start with; just that it was all more nuanced, and in my opinion, the book's merit lay wholly in that nuance. Without it, the story is less convincing, tells us much less about Uganda and although Forest Whittaker tries hard, he can't fully convey the remarkable nature of Amin's personality when the film almost sanitises his madness to make it fit a little more closely to what audiences expect of a movie villain. The film even commits what I consider to be among the cardinal sins of adaptations (but a surprisingly common one); retaining a scene that has been stripped of all context by decisions made elsewhere in the movie. The hijack of an Israeli plane, which is used here to end the story, occurred in the middle of the original and then it made sense; here it makes none, and when the film tells us that the hijack turned international opinion against Amin, it's wholly baffling (in fact, I'm not even sure it's true, but even in the world of the film, it is not a coherent conclusion). Finally, the very end gives the doctor a hope of redemption marred by cliché ("tell the world. they'll believe you. you're a white man") when Fodden's story was deeper, murkier, more ambiguous and so much more interesting. A great disappointment, particularly as the source material is clearly recognisable; but sadly dumbed down at every point that matters.