Look out! He's got a knife!

Review: The Last King of Scotland

OK first up: Forest Whittaker for Oscar. He brings Idi Amin to mad, passionate life. Everything that is fascinating about Amin in this movie is because of Whittaker's superb performance. However, I have some pretty major problems with the movie itself.

This is basically just one more movie about Africa in which a white character is the lead. A young white doctor leads us into the world of Uganda and Idi Amin, when the President makes him his personal physician.

This could be acceptable if the white character was as interesting as - or more interesting than - Idi Amin himself. He's not. To make things worse, he's not even real. The movie is based on a novel for which the character was invented.

When he is on screen, Forest Whitaker is mesmerizing as Amin. The young fellow who plays the doctor is sort of bland, but we follow his exploits instead.

For a couple of years I have been trying to find a good book on Africa written by an African. I have found a number of books by white journalists and white soldiers on how the poor naive Africans were suppressed by the cunning colonialists. It seems to be either that or "the story of my white childhood in Africa amongst the white colonialists and their darkie servants." (see Wah Wah for a recent film version of that all too common story.)

It drives me to distraction. I was OK with the movie when I thought it was at least based on reality, but goddamn it! Idi Amin is a fascinating and contradictory character! Why not make a movie ABOUT HIM, rather than having him as a scary boogey-man in some fictional Scottish kid's OE?

It doesn't seem that far removed from characterising the entire Orient as either Fu Manchu or Charlie Chan (though at least we didn't get a Swede in blackface playing Idi Amin - those two aforementioned characters have yet to be played by anyone who's actually Asian, let alone Chinese).

An analogy for me is the Hellboy movie, where it was apparently felt that we needed a "normal" character to take us into the world of the BPRD. It seems to me that to the people who make movies like The Last King of Scotland, African people are considered as unknowable as the Beast of the Apocalypse (even if they like pancakes and everything).

Africa has been independent for FORTY YEARS. Enough with the colonialist perspective already! I can only think of 2 exceptions in recent history: Tsotsi and Hotel Rwanda. The former is an African movie in the Zulu language about a youth gang, so it would have been very strange if it had a white lead character. The latter is based on a true story.

Go see the movie. It's well made and entertaining, and I reckon movies like this unconsciously expose a subtle racism that many of us deny. It gives us something to think about, and hoipefully to challenge.

Or maybe you could go to the video store and rent the dvd of JSA - Joint Security Area. It's a Korean thriller about the murder of two North soldiers on the border of the North and South. The case is being investigated by a neutral Swiss and Swedish team, lead by a half-Korean woman born and raised in Switzerland who is visiting her father's homeland for the first time. To say more about the plot would be wrong, but rest assured that this is a movie that resolves the plot without pyrotechnics and does not devolve -as most Hollywood thrillers seem to - into either a chase movie or a slasher flick. Go. Rent. Enjoy.

Posted by pearce at February 16, 2007 9:11 PM