* * * *
When a restless young Scottish doctor
takes a job in Uganda, he finds himself embroiled in the reign of dictator Idi Amin.
Starring Forest
Whitaker, James McAvoy, Kerry Washington, Simon McBurney, Gillian Anderson
Written by Peter
Morgan, Jeremy Brock
Produced by Charles
Steel, Lisa Bryer, Andrea Calderwood
Duration 123
minutes
William Friedkin (THE EXORCIST, THE FRENCH CONNECTION) and Paul Greengrass (THE BOURNE SUPREMACY, CAPTAIN PHILIPS) started out directing documentaries, before pivoting to features. Martin Scorsese and Werner Herzog are thought of as narrative guys first and foremost, but still make docus as well.
Some directors, meanwhile, like to blend documentary and fiction at the same time, overlaying a story onto the real lives of non-actors. Steven Soderbergh tried this with BUBBLE; other filmmakers make it their modus operandi, like Harmony Korine (GUMMO, BABY INVASION), Chloe Zhao (THE RIDER, NOMADLAND) and many of recent ANORA Oscar-winner Sean Baker's movies: famously THE FLORIDA PROJECT and RED ROCKET, but also his early efforts like TAKE OUT and PRINCE OF BROOKLYN.
Todd Haynes is an interesting one. He made I’M NOT THERE, ostensibly a biopic of Bob Dylan, but one that cast six multi-gendered actors to portray the musician. Before that, Haynes had made VELVET GOLDMINE, set in glam rock's heyday but following fictional rockers, rather than the Velvet Underground themselves. And then, 20 years later, he went and made a straight-up documentary named THE VELVET UNDERGROUND, which was explicitly about the band!
Then you have those filmmakers who are making pure fiction, but want it to be as realistic as possible. Like the abovementioned Greengrass or Michael Mann (in particular with THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS.)
All of this is to say that the lines between fiction and real life, between depiction and dramatization, and between biopic and inspiration, can be pretty vague.
THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND's Kevin Macdonald is one of those director who started out in non-fiction and then pivoted to feature narratives (although, like Scorsese and Herzog, he does dip his toe back into the documentary waters from time to time). When he moved into narrative feature-making, it was with TOUCHING THE VOID, a docudrama about the near-fatal exploits of two mountain climbers. Now, let’s look a little closer at that genre classification, 'docudrama'. It’s a documentary, and it’s also a drama. It’s a reconstruction, but is it also a dramatization? Inevitably to a degree, but presumably drama-ed up as little as possible.
Interestingly, TOUCHING THE VOID has no screenplay credit. It mentions Joe Simpson, the climber who wrote the book that inspired the film, but not with an adaptation credit, just a mention of him being the book's author. Suggesting that there was no screenplay! But surely Macdonald didn’t drag hundreds of cast and crew up a mountain with a copy of the paperback and then flick through the pages telling them to act bits out on the spot?
What's irrefutable is that the goal with VOID was authenticity – to put us alongside the climbers as if we were there during their ordeal. However, when it came to Macdonald’s next film, THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND, things got a little more complicated.
Here, we have another true story. At least, kind of. The central figure is real-life Ugandan army commander Idi Amin, who did indeed overthrow the president in a 1971 coup d’etat. Amin was the subject of a 1998 novel of the same name by journalist Giles Foden, who was not in Uganda at the time. The novel was then adapted by acclaimed screenwriters Peter Morgan and Jeremy Brock, both of whom have CVs littered with fictionalized accounts of real-life people: THE QUEEN, FROST/NIXON and THE DAMNED UNITED, and MRS BROWN, I AM A SLAVE and DIANA AND I, respectively. To further complicate matters, their screenplay is described as 'considerably different' to its literary source.
THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND isn’t a biopic of Amin; he’s not even the main character. An early caption tells us "This film is inspired by real people and events", and then we open with our actual protagonist: James McAvoy as newly qualified doctor Nicholas. It's 1970 and his dad wants him to practice at home in boring old Scotland, but instead eager-for-adventure Nicholas spins his bedside globe and pokes his finger on Uganda.
He jumps on a plane to East Africa to join up with another white doctor and his wife, played by Gillian Anderson – trying out her Mrs Thatcher English accent years before The Crown. Before long, Nicholas is doling out injections to the villagers, playing street football in the dust, that sort of thing. "You've certainly come at an interesting time," Anderson remarks: Amin's coup has literally just taken place. And soon the new prez is visiting their village, proving to be a charming and popular figure, orating a lot of propaganda about what he's going to do for Uganda. Anderson is sceptical, since the deposed president said the same things – and turned out to be totally corrupt. Ominous.
Nicholas soon gets a chance to find out first-hand the truth behind the rhetoric. During a chance encounter on the road, Amin is impressed both by the medical assistance he receives from Nicholas and by how the young man grabs his handgun and pumps two .45 calibre rounds into a dying cow. Plus he has a thing for Scots, for some reason. And so the usurping general invites Nicholas be his personal physician.
This is a 'seduced by charismatic evil' movie. Nicholas is taken under Amin's wing, and is at first happy about his swanky apartment, vintage company car and elevated status. He defends Amin against people who doubt his benevolence, such as Simon McBurney's English Foreign Office correspondent. But Nicholas soon realises that his new boss is, in fact, a paranoid, philandering despot, with a hair-trigger temper from which even those closest to him aren't safe. Nicholas's life in Uganda spirals out of control, to the point that it comes down to kill or be killed. So, worse even than the streets of 1970s Glasgow.
Forest Whitaker famously won a Best Actor Oscar for playing Amid, in a rare case of award recognition for an established character actor. It was well-deserved, and Whitaker's ably matched by McAvoy, who puts in a star-making turn as the idealist hardened and changed by harsh reality.
However close THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND may be to what really happened in Uganda 50 years ago, it tells a story that's well worth your two hours. And that's the only kind of truth necessary, as far as I'm concerned.
Four stars out of five.
Valid use of the
word ‘last’? The actual last monarch of Scotland, as
opposed to Great Britain as a whole, was Queen Anne (1702 to 1707).
What would a movie called THE FIRST KING OF SCOTLAND be about? BRAVEHEART? I reckon?
Previously: THE
LAST ANGRY MAN
Next time: INSIDIOUS: THE LAST KEY
Check out my
books: Jonathanlastauthor.com
