Powerful, epic, personal and affecting

Rating: 8/10 (24 September 2006)

It may seem like an unusual name for a movie about the events surrounding the 1970's rise to power of Ugandan military dictator Idi Amin, but to see is to understand.
The plot, based on a novel that in turn was inspired by actual events, follows a freshly-minted young Scottish doctor named Nicholas Garrigan. In just a few quick scenes, director Kevin Macdonald clearly shows us that this drinking, pot smoking free spirit is terrified by his suffocating future of being a family practitioner in business with his overbearing old man.
Not nearly as sure of what he wants as what he doesn't want, Nick spins a globe and winds up in Uganda just as a coup has taken place. The director again lets us know quickly what this young Scot's about; Nick has a hard time keeping his hands off the ladies, as he jumps right into the sack with a flirtatious fellow bus traveler before he arrives at the village where he is to assist the resident doctor.
A nicely slimmed down and understated Gillian Anderson, sporting a decent British accent, portrays the doctor's beautiful and under-appreciated wife. She picks up Nick from the bus stop and ferries him to his post through an eerie night road scape full of ghostly Ugandans wandering in the truck's headlights.
Nick enjoys some aspects of his new gig: playing soccer with the kids, vaccinating little ones against the diseases that ravage the land, and yes, eyeing the doctor's wife.
His seduction attempt nearly succeeds; Anderson smartly portrays a good woman whose need to be bad is only slightly weaker than her desire to be noble. Still in turmoil, they attend a rally nearby where Idi Amin is addressing his new constituents. Charismatic and rabble-rousing, Forest Whitaker convincingly portrays the first of many facets of Amin that will be revealed throughout the course of this film.
It would be a disservice to the viewer who has not yet seen this thick, affecting film to describe the plot in any more detail, but suffice it to say that a fortuitous encounter with the dictator soon leads to Nick away from his boredom, good works and untasted forbidden fruit of the countryside village to the inner circle of the charming, terrifying and possibly insane bully Amin.
The aimlessness of Nick's life begins to come clear for him as he gets deeper and deeper into the moral quagmire of being chief adviser and personal physician to the man who was ultimately responsible for the 300,000 deaths of those who opposed him within Uganda.
The ending, after a build-up nearly as hallucinatory and overwhelming as "Apocalypse Now", comes down during the Entebbe hijacking and hostage crisis of 1976.
Nick's journey is told without a misstep and an epic, significant air hangs over this grainy, you-are-there photography. And the impact of casual violence and its affect on the value of human life has rarely been portrayed with more vividness than in this film. Nothing done by a Freddy or a Jason can match the atrocities visited upon those on the wrong side of Amin's politics, paranoia or temper.
For the squeamish, this is a harrowing ride.
The soundtrack throbs with African popular music of the time (think Fela Kuti, with less improv and more melody) and the sense of time and place is utterly convincing.
As well made as this film is, it is still the cake that the icing of the actors decorates. Forest Whitaker gives what is without a doubt the performance of his career in Idi Amin. And Oscar nomination, if not an outright win, is a certainty if there is any justice in this world. And James McAvoy's callow Nicholas grows in heft and morality before our eyes. At first, he enjoys the opulence and easy living of being among Amin's inner circle, but, as he continues to dally with the wrong ladies and mock the covert operatives from England that approach him, an actual person with inner strength appears. And though his answer to all this is to run away, the impediments placed in his path teach him a thing or two about being a human being. MacAvoy deserves plentiful praise for bringing this pleasure-seeking young doctor to life, then shepherding him through these changes believably before our eyes.