Give up?
Forest Whitaker.
He’s the big, gentle actor best known in my circles as one of the hunters in the decent SF flick Species – he was an “empath” – but general audiences may know him from such diverse roles as those in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Bird, Platoon, and The Crying Game. Normally he’s soft-spoken and gives off a relaxed, peaceful vibe. He’s also obviously extremely well-ranged in his acting spectrum. Just how so is proved in his chameleonic role as Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, a magnetic, charming, and very, very frightening portrayal that earned him the well-deserved Award.
I didn’t know much about the dictator, recalling only those things I heard peripherally growing up in the late-70s. Cannibalism, I think, plus lots of people indiscriminately butchered in a faraway land. I was not even aware that this evil man lived on past his overthrowing, being somewhat surprised to hear that he died in 2003 after years of exile in – you guessed it! – the land our allies, Saudi Arabia, a land flowing with oil and extremism.
But I read mucho good things about the movie, so I decided to check it out. It follows the path of a youthful and idealistic Scottish doctor who decides, quite randomly, to go to Uganda to ply his skills and save the world (and more likely to escape his overbearing father). He arrives in the hot and sweaty equatorial country at the beginning of the coup that brings Idi Amin to power. He, like we, very, very quickly become enthralled and hypnotized by the cult of personality that is Amin. A chance meeting where he heals the injured General’s arm draws our hero deeper and deeper into Amin’s graces, eventually becoming a “trusted” advisor. The young doctor finds out too late that it is impossible to extricate himself unscathed from the evil he has willingly wallowed among, a slumbering fly spun methodically into a cocoon by a black widow.
Forest Whitaker is jaw-dropping phenomenal as the dictator. Charming, psychotic, mercurial, imbalanced, persuassive and powerful. We’ve seem them before – Hitler and the upper-echelon Nazi aristocracy, Stalin, Mao, Minh, Hussein, even home grown phenomena such as John Gotti and his predecessors. That fascinating variable that is called by the blanket-term charisma, that indefinable, terrible element of personality that makes men follow its possessor up to and even through the gates of Hell. Whitaker nails it perfectly, it seems to me, in this two hour movie, of which he has perhaps a little over an hour’s screen time.
There’s lots and lots of tension and some violence, but nothing excessive save for two scenes, one brief and one drawn out, near the very end that were not entirely necessary to move the plot along, save to further show us how soulless and amoral men like Amin are. The young actor playing the Scottish doctor (I forget his name but my wife’s seen him in a couple of recent roles) does a tremendous job as well, making an incredulous story (one apparently “based” on true events) entirely believable. I guess I’m giving it a positive grade in this little post. I didn’t set out to review the movie, nor do I feel I’m qualified to do so, but I just felt obligated to say something about it, if only to praise the artistic value of a really good acting performance.
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