The Operating Theatre of Power

Rating: 8/10 (28 January 2007)

The Last King of Scotland brings us back 40 years, a time when real news still was carried in US newspapers.
Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy) is a freshly minted MD ready to go out and conquer the world. Rather than take up with his father in practice in relatively tranquil Scotland, he goes on an adventure to Uganda, a newly independent African country formerly in the British Empire. Garrigan might have spent his time in a rural clinic unnoticed but fate puts him in tight with Uganda's new dictator Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker) who has recently seized power. Amin brings Garrigan to the capitol Kampala where Garragan is installed as Presidential physician and best friend to a lonely ruler.
With a touch of self - deceptive innocence, Garrigan plays the neophyte walking in the shadow of the perilous backstage to power. Garrigan enters the operating theatre of power with a detached bemusement of the spectator at a play. And Idi Amin is one for creating good theatre with his antics.
Can the attraction of the glamor of the power, prestige and privileges blind Garrigan to the brutality of the dictatorship he serves? Certainly aspects of Idi Amin's rule, like that of George W Bush would have been comic if it were not for the cost in lives.
Forest Whitaker rendered a bravura performance as the paranoid dictator, capturing both Amin's exhilerance for power and love of the the theatre of power.