the gap year from hell

Rating: 9/10 (28 July 2008)

"All aberrations of nature are possible." Freshly graduated in medicine, young doctor Nicholas Garrigan chooses Uganda over Canada to escape his father's stifling influence. He ends up with a surrogate father in the shape of Idi Amin, and being stifled becomes the least of his problems.
Kevin Macdonald's adaptation gives its protagonist the standard arc from ignorance through awareness to a form of redemption. Garrigan gets caught up in events he is too immature and self-centered to comprehend. His own downfall is foreshadowed by characters in his periphery. Older, wiser Sarah resists his seduction and silently pities his gullibility to Amin's charm. The pompous Embassy staffer is hardly likable but his realpolitik cuts right through Garrigan's naivety. Garrigan sets out to drink, lay a few women, have some fun. When he wakes up to the real world, he finds himself carrying a Ugandan passport, culpable in murder, and charged with carrying out assassination on behalf of Her Majesty's government.
McAvoy is perfect as the young doctor mentored and then destroyed by a more powerful, charismatic monster. Forest Whitakker has been universally praised for his depiction of Amin, and rightly so. Garrigan tells him he is a child and that is what makes him so scary. True, but scary isn't the half of it. Cleverly, Macdonald keeps Amin's atrocities off-stage, so that the slow dawning of the man's terrible nature comes to the audience at the same time as it comes to Garrigan. When it does rush in, in a scene of brutal mutilation to Garrigan's lover, the shock is visceral.
Unfortunately, there is an element of Heart of Darkness here, Africa viewed through the white man's eyes as savage and untamed. There are shades of grey; Garrigan and the Brit diplomats are unsavoury, though certainly more palatable than Amin and his henchmen. The only virtuous, and in the end heroic character, is the black doctor who eventually saves Garrigan, only to be summarily disposed off for his troubles. It is an ignoble, perfunctory death, symbolic of the 300,000 Amin inflicted on his people.
More than biopic or historical drama, Last King is the tale of a weak man taken in and then beaten down by an overpowering, charming but destructive presence. Like the doctor who gave his life for Garrigan, we hope he goes on to live a life worthy of the sacrifices made for him. It is a pity Nicholas Garrigan is fictional, I would like to know if he lived up to that call.