The Last King of Scotland: Post-Colonial Complexities

Last King of Scotland Review (watch the excellent Integral Politics talk by Ken Wilber below too!)

Forest Whitaker's portrayal of post-colonial African dictator Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland won him the Best Actor Oscar for 2006. It is a breathtaking performance. Even more breathtaking though is the way that writers Giles Foden and Jeremy Brock and director Kevin Mc Donald (in his first feature film outing) managed to create a riveting piece of cinema that deals with such politically and therefore emotionally loaded material by weaving together fact and fiction in a way that serves not only the art itself, but also it's symbolic capacity to convey truth.

Playing opposite Whitaker is James McEvoy as Amin's Scottish personal physician Nicholas Garrigan. The doctor is a fictional character based on the fact that the dictator did have personal British physicians attend to him. At first glance one might easily dismiss the conceit of this charming  young White character as the standard noble-Caucasian-hero-in-savage-Africa device, but the filmmakers ably turn that canard on it's head.

They use the intense relationship between the two men to tease out layers of both personal psychological, and larger global historic meaning. Amin is clearly a madman, drunk on power, intoxicated with fame and image, charmingly sociopathic. Garrigan is on his own narcissistic flight of rebellion against the confines of his repressed Scottish home and society. He wants to have some fun and do some good, and he is taken with the Ugandans and their idealistic and charismatic new leader.

The two bond over Amin's love of Scotland as a symbol of proud warrior resistance to the British. The real dictator actually did once declare himself the "last king of Scotland" as a defiant middle finger to Britain, while offering to send them economic aid because his economy was supposedly so strong. Shades of Zimbabwe's offer to send democratic observers to oversee the Florida recount in America in 2000.

The young Scot represents the 70's generation of liberal privileged young people from the British Isles in Africa - rooting for the Africans to have their freedom, naively expecting the best out of the post-colonial revolutions. Lovingly shot with appreciation for Uganda's vibrant beauty  - the film makes us want the best for the country and it's people too. But it is in Simon McBurney's Nigel Stone, the world-weary, bigoted classic British diplomat that we get the most nuanced character. We hate his smarminess and his racism, but in the end he  is actually interpreting the situation correctly and sees Amin for the butcher he is, even if he doesn't quite grasp that he is a creation of the Empire.

What is so remarkable about the film is that it manages to tackle this very difficult and nuanced problem without appearing racist in it's depiction of a truly brutal dictator responsible for the death of around 300,000 of his countrymen, and without ignoring the very real travesty of the imperial colonization of Africa by Europe. In this way it is a deeply human film that shows the ragged edges of a fabric of dysfunction, abused power, social upheaval and moral chaos.

Garrigan gets his come-uppance in a nasty torture scene in which Amin says to him, " You thought you would be the White man come to play with the Africans. Well we are not playthings, we are real. This room is real and your death will probably be the first real thing to happen in your life."

This after another contrivance, that of the Scotsman cuckolding the dictator and getting his wife pregnant, has been used as a potent symbol of the arrogant colonial attitude in Africa and the rage that it presaged in response.

Whitaker really is the centerpiece of this movie though - he is so larger-than-life, so likable and so terrifying that you cannot but be captivated and deeply affected by his performance.

One of the few films to really take on the complex themes of our global history of colonialism, oppression and what happens after the revolution, The Last King of Scotland is quite an achievement.

Also watch At Play in the Fields of the Lord  a film about missionaries, native people and political corruption in the Brazilian Amazon Basin. The film is beautifully shot and features an amazing star-studded cast that ably portrays the identity conflicts of colonialism, missionary zeal and the mystique of tribal culture.

I highly reccommend last year's best foreign film Oscar winner  The Lives of Others.
It's about East Germany in the time before Gorbachev began the glasnost reforms and the Wall came down. A brilliant playwright and his famous actress girlfriend are caught in a web of manipulation and deceit in a climate of surveillance and paranoia as the state official who has his eye on the girl abuses his power. The movie is note-perfect in it's exploration of the question: where do our morality and humanity lie in the face of completely corrupted ideology and oppressive power?


Additional films about related issues of ideology and sweeping social change in the 20th century:

Farewell My Concubine tracks the political turmoil of China from pre-WWII  through the Japanese occupation  into Communism and Mao's cultural revolution. One of the most extraordinary films ever made, FMC deals with sexual identity, political ideology, economic oppression and the life of artists buffeted by the hurricane winds of  social change- it requires some stamina though.

Sunshine - originally a mini-series, but rentable as a long film. Tracks a Jewish Hungarian family through pre-WWII homegrown anti-semitism into Nazi occupation and then Soviet rule. Again the family dynamics and personal struggle against the background of out of control social and political forces.

Catch A Fire follows the true story of a young Black man in South Africa radicalized by arrest and torture for a terrorist crime he did not commit. Apartheid and the struggle to overthrow it, the relentless police colonel and his inhumane methods, the ordinary man who becomes a freedom fighter because of his personal experience of oppression and violation. Written by the son of the then illegal South African Communist Party leader Joe Slovo, who along with neslon Mandela was an important figure in that struggle.

Stay tuned for films about our tumultuous times - notably a couple in production right now about the ill-starred American invasion of Iraq.

From an Integral perspective the Last King of Scotland is a meditation on complexities of enacting the Orange and Green emphasis on democracy and equal rights in a world teeming with Red and Amber energies.

If you're interested, watch this Ken Wilber talk on Integral Politics - it's pretty fantastic.