The Last King Of Scotland

Synopsis: Scottish doctor Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy) travels to Uganda to escape a boring life of being a GP with his father. There, he helps the new President of Uganda, Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker) after a car accident and unexpectedly finds himself the personal physician to one of history’s most infamous monsters.

How does evil take hold in the world? What does it look like, why doesn’t anyone stop it? These are the disquieting questions posed by The Last King of Scotland. But it doesn’t do anything overtly, in fact, initially it seems quite incompetent in its elected task. Eschewing documentary realism we’re introduced to Dr Nicholas Garrigan, a young Scotsman desperate to escape his homeland. He takes a globe of the world and spins it, wherever his finger lands, that’s where he’ll go. Unless his finger lands on Canada, in which case he’ll have another spin. So he goes to Uganda to work in a mission hospital. He travels in dirty buses, picks up and shags local women, all in rapidfire editing with shaky-cam visuals and thumping music. The camera is so disorienting and poorly deployed you think that the people making the film have no idea what they’re doing. And that’s the trick, it lulls you into thinking that it’s just messy and unfocused. And then it introduces Amin.

Garrigan and Sarah Merrit (Gillian Anderson), the wife of the other doctor at the mission, are pulled up by soldiers and told that a doctor is needed. To begin with it sounds serious, then it turns out that Amin’s car hit a cow and he sprained his hand. Amin is just ridiculous. A foolish manchild who exaggerates everything that happens to him. When Amin learns that Garrigan is Scottish, he can’t stop praising the Scots and subsequently invites Garrigan to be his personal physician. For Garrigan, the job is both a boost to his ego and a chance to escape Sarah, who he’s unsuccessfully trying to have an affair with. Push and pull put him into a higher orbit and suddenly he’s one of Idi Amin’s closest confidantes.  

Amin is a paranoid fool. At least, that’s how he seems to begin with. A bad case of gas is mistaken by him for poisoning. When he’s shown to be silly he doesn’t get angry, he just laughs and praises his doctor for his wisdom. He showers Garrigan with praise, telling him how wonderful he is. Garrigan, you suspect, likes the feeling of superiority over Amin as much as he loves the attention. And this is how evil takes over the world, by seeming less than what it is. Just like the film itself. 

Whitaker, who won the Best Actor Oscar for his efforts, is outstanding as Idi Amin Dada, especially as the film progresses. Once drawn into this world, the descent of Amin and Garrigan into nightmare is compelling. Amin is not a fool, he’s an insanely dangerous man who commands the loyalty of everyone around him. Even Garrigan can’t help himself, he dobs in a minister who looks like he might be a spy. He knows, deep down, that Amin will kill the man, but he can’t not denounce him. He’s trapped. And once he decides he has to get out, that option isn’t going to come without pain, both for him and for us. Squeamish stomachs should avoid this film.

The Last King of Scotland severely messed me up. Hardly a surprise really, considering it’s a film about a man who massacred roughly 300,000 of his own people and whose cruelty was well known. But this is isn’t so much a document of a time as it is a study of evil. A filmic essay that shows how easy it is to fall under its spell and how desperate and deadly are the roads that lead away from it.

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