Toxic temptations

Rating: 8/10 (30 September 2006)

In this film Kevin Macdonald, a Scot, directs James McAvoy, a Scot, as Nicholas Garrigan, a brash, spirited, and foolish young doctor just out of medical school in the early 1970's who overnight becomes a close associate of Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker), the new dictator of Uganda. Amin had served in the British army and developed an admiration for the Scots. He gave himself the title "His Excellency President for Life Field Marshal Al Hadji Dr. Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, King of Scotland, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular." He liked to dress his soldiers in kilts and have them sing Scottish songs.
Before this Macdonald made Touching the Void and other documentaries, including One Day in September, about the Munich Israeli Olympic team massacre. This film, which is not a documentary and departs freely from fact at least at certain key points, is based on the 1997 novel by Giles Foden, which concerns the doctor. But Macdonald's writers, including Jeremy Brock, who penned Mrs. Brown, and Peter Morgan, who scripted Frears' The Queen, have jazzed up the more bland original character and made him younger and bolder. Garrigan has picked Uganda at random. He is attractive and dashing: he's already flirting with the pretty blonde wife of the head of the rural medical clinic he's come to work in, when he's grabbed, with her, to "save" the paranoid Amin. The newly ascended President for Life has hurt his hand in an accident involving a farmer's cow. Garrigan impresses Amin by not just calmly fixing his sprained hand but also grabbing his presidential pistol and putting the cow out of its misery.
When Amin learns Nicholas is a Scot, he takes off his military shirt complete with medals and trades it on the spot for a "Scotland" T-shirt Nicolas is wearing -- for his son, Campbell. Amin has another son named Macgregor.
Almost immediately thereafter Amin persuades the young doctor to leave the clinic and become his personal physician in Kampala, the capital (where the movie was shot), sets him up with a Mercedes and a posh apartment in the presidential compound, and makes him a most trusted consultant, allowing him to decide on the design for a major building. Observing this exceptional access, a cynical British diplomat (Simon McBurney) approaches Nicholas and cautions him to "keep in touch," an offer the young man initially rebuffs.
Garrigan's seduced, as are we, initially, by Amin's charisma and charm, and only gradually does he become skeptical and eventually horrified as he realizes he's the intimate of a ferocious dictator who, estimates say, killed off 300,000 of his citizens, as well as expelling all the Asians from the country. What's interesting is how the daring young man as we see him can hardly help being thus seduced; how the two men seduce each other. But Nicholas is in a terribly weak position when things go wrong. Whitaker and McAvoy play off each other nicely as they act out this process.
Several dramatic events involving Garrigan in the two-hour film's latter segment strain credulity, including the way the young doctor's escape is intertwined with the Entebbe plane hijacking incident, and the kinds of trouble he gets into on the way to that escape.
What makes this film, whose plot line can scarcely compete with that of the more multi-leveled and thought-provoking The Constant Gardener, and which has a grainy newsreel look that's undistinguished, is Forest Whitaker's astonishing performance as Idi Amin Dada. Whitaker usually plays soft spoken, sensitive types. This time he nails a range from fearful to seductive to terrifying, connecting them with a seamlessly explosive energy. One would say Whitaker is this picture, except that it's unmistakably also young McAvoy's. Essential to the film is the way McAvoy, who's had mostly more minor and more purely physical roles before (he was the fawn in Narnia) plays off Whitaker beautifully and woos us too with his convincing enthusiasm and dash. This is a very watchable but also disturbing movie which one wishes might have maintained greater verisimilitude. When documentarians embroider the truth, sometimes they go off way too far. But this is not unusual: a great performance in a less-than-great movie. We have to take what we can get, and in The Last King of Scotland we get a very wild ride.