Shockingly Absurd and Profoundly Brilliant

Rating: 10/10 (20 January 2008)

Anyone who caught Forest Whitaker as jazz great Charlie Parker in the Clint Eastwood directed "Bird" (1988) may easily have found themselves thinking, "Wow, an actor with that kind of genius is bound to win an Oscar one day!" But who could have guessed that it might be for Whitaker's titanic portrayal of the former Ugandan President Idi Amin in the riveting film THE LAST KING OF Scotland? A too-quick assessment of this film might make a viewer think it's one more good movie about a larger-than-life ruler seduced and corrupted by power. A second welcomed study reveals that it's actually a great movie about not one, but two men seduced and corrupted by the lures of power. Idi Amin is definitely one of them but so is the Scottish doctor Nicholas Garrigan, played with wonderful naivety and passion by James McAvoy.
For Idi Amin, as portrayed here, the seduction is irresistible and ultimately self-destructive because of a need to rise above the humiliations of his past and to meet the demands of a changing Africa. Garrigan finds himself seduced by power largely because Amin makes it available to him when he adopts the Scottish native as his personal physician, only to increasingly demand he serve as a top political adviser. Instead of refusing to give advice he's neither informed enough nor trained to provide, Garrigan enjoys being flattered to the point that he boldly has an affair with Kay Amin, the president's wife, played by the stunning Kerry Washington. Consequently, one moment he is embracing Amin as a father figure, and in the next he is suffering the kind of brutal fate no one likes to imagine.
"The Last King of Scotland" swings brilliantly back and forth between shocking absurdity and outright tragedy. It's easy enough to see toward the film's beginning that Amin is a leader with true love for his people. Yet it becomes equally apparent as the film progresses that his private terrors and political wrath are at least as monumental as any love he holds. To blend such a range of psychological extremes with credibility that evokes both outrage and even, at times, empathy, is not a feat that many actors could have pulled off, but lo and behold: Mr. Whitaker did.
News coming out of Uganda during the 1970s invariably presented Amin as a bloodthirsty dictator allowed to run amok with his heinous inclinations unchecked before finally being exiled to Saudi Arabia. "The Last King of Scotland," based on Giles Foden's novel, gives us a more complete portrait of a very complex man and country.
by Aberjhani, author of "Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance"