The Last King of Scotland (Film Review)
A long time ago - so long Google search didn't even turn it up! - I read and wrote about a book called The Last King of Scotland, a piece of literary fiction concerning itself with Uganda's infamous dictator, Idi Amin. I had mixed feelings when I learned it would be made into a film, and it's with mixed feelings that I'm writing this review, disappointed in so many ways with the film. The disappointment comes with a sense of awareness in how film works as a medium, and how it can both shortchange and enhance a story.
The story the book concerns itself with is that of Nicholas Garrigan, a young Scottish doctor who finds himself enlisted in the services of Amin after coincidence brings them together. Amin, while racing his red Maserati has had an accident and Garrigan is summoned as a doctor to his aid. The help he gives is quite trivial: he bandages up the dictator's sprained wrist. But in helping Amin a bond is established which takes him through the course of Amin's presidency: power to corruption, and corruption to downfall.
The encounter between Amin and Garrigan as described in the book and later portrayed in the film is a model for how the book and the film use the same events and part ways. The book's description is as follows:
"On this occasion, he'd hit a cow - some poor smallholder had probably been fattening it up for slaughter - spun the vehicle and been thrown clear, spraining his wrist in the process. The soldiers, following him in their slow, camouflaged jeeps, had come to call for me. I had to go and attend to him by the roadside. Groaning in the grass, Idid was convinced the wrist was broken, and he cursed me in Swahili as I bound it up.
But I must have done something right because, a few months later, I received a letter from the Minister of Health, Jonah Wasswa, appointing me to the post of President Amin's personal physician - Medical Doctor to His Excellency - at State House, one of his residences. That was Idi's way, you see. Punish or reward. You couldn't say no. Or I didn't think, back then, that you could. Or I didn't really think about it at all."
The film version is different. There is no red Maserati - the vehicle of choice is downplayed - and as Garrigan tries to attend to Amin the dying cow begins to moan desperately. The cinematography becomes hectic: as the moaning becomes louder the screen cuts rapidly between Garrigan and the cow several times creating a sense of nervous desperation. It is all put to a stop when Garrigan grabs Idi Amin's personal gun and shoots the cow in the head at point blank range, ending the stress that has built to that moment. Soldiers surround him with guns and he realizes the danger he's in until Amin, played by Forest Whitaker begins to laugh, melting the tension in an instant. Amin is taken with Garrigan from that point on, as a man of action.
It became clear to me that the dilemma of the film maker is evident in all this because not only is the constraint of resources, such as the amount of money it takes to purchase and crash a red Maserati, an issue when capturing a book but how the book can easily understate what many would consider boring on screen. Hence the need for dramatic improvisation: the loud music, the quick cuts, the tension. This disparity of book and film kept coming back to me over and over as the film played up sexual appetites, parties, and character conflict.
The film did well in portraying aspects of Amin as I understood his legacy - conversing with J about the film brought on the word cartoonish, which applied to so much of his presidential story. What the crash scene understates is that Amin is driving a red Maserati - a vehicle on the order of one hundred thousand dollars - and his injury, a sprained wrist, dominates all notions of the poor man's cow which has more inherent worth than does Amin's car. Forest Whitaker did well in portraying Amin's cartoonish stupidity, in one scene making desperate calls for Garrigan as he thinks he is dying - and then laughing moments later when Garrigan cures him of his real ailment: flatulence. There's the scene as well, this one based on a true event, of Amin riding a white horse at a party, and lassoing his air force commander.
Amin, however comical the interludes, is a dark figure and his madness begins with subtle hints of paranoia and ends with some very gruesome scenes - gruesome to the extent that the shock value can disorient the viewer into thinking they are watching a horror film rather than real events. Two scenes in particular can be disorienting and yet the truth is that Amin was responsible for the type of torture and killing that is portrayed. The trouble, in a film that aims to dramatize and create sensation, is that it can't be taken in its proper context of reality and instead seems "film-ish" like the conclusion in which Garrigan is aboard an airplane, flying away - escaping the madness with an empty, weary look in his eyes.
Of course film cannot achieve the depth and concinnity that is found on the written page but it isn't just simply this disparity that left me with an empty feeling after the film ended. It had everything to do with how the changes made were a distraction on what would have been a great tale if only left alone. The conclusion of the book is the best example of this when considered alongside the film.
In the book, as Garrigan becomes more desperate he plans an escape by simply driving south towards the Tanzanian border for safety. He has an encounter with some soldiers and abandons his vehicle near a large forest. In the process of his escape, he's bitten by a snake and loses conciousness - and rescued by a tribe of people restricting themselves to the forest. Shortly afterwards, when he is well enough to leave on his own, he makes his way out of the forest and to a familiar place where he is taken into the care of Tanzanian soldiers fighting their way to Kampala and the defeat of Amin. Before the book ends Garrigan encounters Amin underneath Mulago hospital, where he'd tortured so many people, hiding from what he knows to be the ultimate consequence of his misrule. He is not conciliatory, however:
"Yet I am not so bad. People keep saying I am Hitler. Why do they keep on Hitler? The Hitler problem is now past tense... I know that the Israelis tried to poison the waters of the Nile to be killin gme. That is one reason why people are fighting towards me: because I know many things. In no book are these things written except in my head... Yes, and I know that very soon I will escape from here. Alive. Because, as I have said, my dreams always come true."
The escape of Garrigan and the final encounter with Amin held more for me than the film's conclusion, which ended the way a typical horror film does with the survivors passage to safety. Untouched it would have made for more compelling drama even if diluted by limited capabilities of film and it would have layered the story with the remorseful cognizance of the doctor and the unforgivable, arrogant stupidity of Amin. Moreover the endings left two varied points of view - in the film we end with the white doctor's escape from the clutches of Africa, on his way to tell the truth about Amin to a public who will listen "because [he's] white." In the book version Garrigan returns in the midst of controversy to a public that is aware of the monstrosity that is Idi Amin, trying to write at length about his experience to distance himself from the dictator and grasp at an explanation for how he was complicit and trapped during his time in Uganda.
I don't read very quickly - I'd guess The Last King of Scotland took me at least a few weeks to complete. But the reward for a little patience is depth - the layers of a story which, albeit falling short of the capacity of life, make us see people multidimensionally and let a story capture many things with understatement, overstatement, allusion, and plain prose. Everywhere that a film gives us a vignette or a dramatic sequence from which to percieve a truth, written word paints a canvas that we can approach from different angles and distances, focusing on this and that, gleaning more each time. Although the short two hours is easier, patience, as it seems to always do, pays a better reward in the end.
A few things:
About the book, here is an interview with Giles Foden shortly after The Last King of Scotland was released.
Here is a more recent piece by Foden about the book and his reaction to the film.
An interesting aside - Foden's more recent book Zanzibar hasn't been published in the US because, apparently, it contains some controversial attitudes towards US foreign policy in Africa.
11:58:29 PM 
|
|
