Forest’s prime evil

It is said that Forest Whitaker’s performance as former Ugandan Pres. Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland is so eerily convincing that present-day Ugandans who saw the actor walking around in costume in their country thought the dictator had returned from exile.

On the other hand, Amin family members say the man nicknamed "Dada" was better looking than Whitaker, and by no means crazy.

One thing’s pretty clear: Whitaker’s performance is likely to grab an Oscar, as he’s already snagged a Golden Globe and BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Theater Actors) trophy.

You can judge for yourself in Kevin MacDonald’s film, which combines studious research with, ahem, creative license in the form of a young Scottish doctor character who randomly picks Uganda from a globe, ends up working there in a mission hospital, then is handpicked by the paranoid leader as his personal physician.

Dr. Nick Garrigan (James McAvoy) heads to Uganda with a mix of cockiness and idealism, tries to hit on a married English hospital worker (played by Gillian Anderson; remember her?), and impresses new President Amin by bandaging the dictator’s broken wrist after a roadside accident. He soon gets enlisted as Amin’s doctor and lives near the palace. Other perks include a Mercedes Benz roadster, lots of Ugandan nubiles to bed and the prestige of being the President’s "closest adviser."

But Amin is dangerously volatile, and as Garrigan watches previous "closest advisers" disappearing one by one, he begins to realize he’s made a deal with the devil, or something close to it.

Idi Amin is a character I remember from news footage back in the ’70s. I think it was around the time of the Raid on Entebbe, when Israeli commandos freed airplane hostages from a Ugandan airport where they were being held by Palestinian hijackers. This put the Islamic Amin in a bad light, after gaining much media attention as a smiling, joking charismatic black leader of an African country. In a way, his leadership had been great news for Africans: he was one of the first to take over the reins from British colonizers, and this scenario would be repeated in decades to come, with varying results. It’s not his taking power that was the problem: it’s what Idi Amin did with it.

Faced with frequent coup attempts (not unlike local presidents) he dispatched military death squads to rid the country of his enemies — usually by beheading them. The number of "enemies" eventually mounted to some 300,000 Ugandans. It was mass-scale butchery, something that is sadly commonplace in Africa’s history.

As played by Whitaker, Amin has a boxer’s moves (Amin was a lightweight boxing champ), charging and retreating, framing his every pronouncement with pumped-up hand gestures. Every time he looks at someone, you never know if it’s the death gaze, or if he’s about to explode into laughter. Whitaker captures that crazy edge, and he’s the best thing in the movie.

Unfortunately, the script takes Whitaker’s flashy performance and reduces Amin to a one-dimensional character — the psychotic dictator. Worse, Garrigan is seven kinds of stupid, first failing to leave the country when he has the chance, then sleeping with one of Amin’s many wives, then botching an assassination attempt on the dictator. His UK passport is stolen; in its place, he is given a fresh new Ugandan passport. The plot gets flimsy toward the end, as Garrigan races to give his pregnant lover an abortion, meanwhile avoiding detection by Amin’s increasingly suspicious security officers. This is a pity, because The Last King of Scotland could have been a more penetrating portrait of Idi Amin (director MacDonald is an Oscar-winning documentary maker, so he does not lack depth). Amin’s rise to power — with alleged complicity from British intelligence — is a familiar case of a foreign power backing a power-hungry maniac in the name of self-interest. ("He may be a psycho, but he’s our psycho.")

As for Amin, he may not have been a psycho, perhaps just a megalomaniac, as indicated by his preferred title during his rule: "His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, 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."

And like many other dictators, he was foxy enough to hide his stolen money offshore and find exile in a friendly country, Saudi Arabia, where he peacefully expired in 2003.

One nice touch to The Last King of Scotland, though, is the soundtrack, which features vintage 1970s tracks from Hugh Masakela, the Uhuru Dance Band, Jingo and Tony Allen that reflect popular African music of the disco era. At least it seemed like a party, for a while.