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The Last King of Scotland February 13, 2007 |
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Much has been made already about the performance of Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin in this drama about Amin’s bloody and out of control reign as President of Uganda, but getting short shrift is relative newcomer James McAvoy, who literally anchors the narrative as the naïve young doctor from Scotland who gets swept up in Amin’s power and charms, only to regret getting so close to a paranoid monster. McAvoy’s Nicholas Garrigan is the vessel in which we witness Amin’s hold on the country, as an outsider, like the audience, he is taken in by the dictator’s relative mastery of the media, and then horrified and frightened when it all goes to pot and Amin’s paranoid delusions results in genocide. Without Garrigan anchoring the story, and giving the audience that needed innocent angle in which to witness the overpowering presence of Idi Amin, the film would be little more than a fictional recreation of Barbet Schroeder’s famous doc “Idi Amin Dada”, but with that outsider story arch the film becomes accessible to an audience possibly unschooled in the life and times of the troubled madman. Fine direction from Kevin Macdonald (“Touching the Void”), and of course the award winning performance by Whitaker make the film well worth checking out. by Adam Suraf |