By Armond White

The Last King of Scotland

Directed by Kevin MacDonald

“Boo!” Forest Whitaker says in The Last King of Scotland, the newest boogie man movie. This one purports to have a historical basis, showing how the late Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, charmed a gullible white medical student (James McAvoy) into being his personal physician and advisor. But the result is still another scary black man stereotype. How did Samuel L. Jackson let this role get away?

Whitaker’s Idi goes peek-a-boo when he organizes several servants to pose as body doubles in an attempt to foil any potential assassins. This ruse inadvertently points to the film industry’s multiplicity of black screen effigies who are either junkies, thieves, convicts, murders, rapists, liars, philanderers, etc. By scaring the daylights out of his white sidekick, Whitaker’s showcase comes off as little more than a super Training Day: King Kong Idi Amin.

What rouses a thinking viewer’s skepticis is that the film is adeliberate fabrication. Screenwriter Peter Morgan (who also scripted Helen Mirren’s sympathetic impersonation of Elizabeth II in Stephen Frears’ The Queen), adapts this up-close view of Idi from a novel by Giles Foden that has scant basis in fact. There was no white Scottish confidante among Amin’s personnel. This simply continues that same “white’s-first” tactic in Cry Freedom and Mississippi Burning, where black characters are considered insufficient to dominate a narrative. The Last King of Scotland never tries to imagine Idi’s psychology or a black African perspective; Morgan leaves history to justify every demonizing cliché. 

It’s rare when a black movie actor is not playing a stereotype that comes from white fear and ignorance. For that reason, it’s hard to get behind the hyperbolic acclaim for Whitaker’s sub-Emperor Jones star turn. The performance has Whitaker’s customary nuance, idiosyncratic gentleness and subtle power, so why do critics now pretend that Whitaker has created an indelible characterization? 

Critics duly noted Whitaker’s delicately detailed, deeply felt performances in Johnny Handsome, A Rage in Harlem, The Crying Game, Ghost Dog, Phone Booth, and Panic Room—without crying out for Academy commendation. Those performances validated the broad span of American personality; Whitaker could be warmly masculine while changing perception of what was heroic. To single-out Whitaker’s Idi merely justifies the black stereotyping that Whitaker had avoided ever since his breakthrough in Clint Eastwood’s 1988 Charlie Parker biographer Bird. In Bird one recognized Whitaker as a new poetic kind of actor who ventured into a certain insinuating emotion that was discouraged from black film actors’ repertoire during the Blaxploitation era. Juano Hernández had it in Intruder in the Dust, Ivan Dixon had it in Nothing But a Man and Ron O’Neal showed a farewell glimpse of it as a Soledad Brother intellectual in the
1977 Brothers. 

Sure, Morgan throws in ambivalent details, hinting at Idi Amin’s rage toward European colonialism. But they’re outnumbered by sexually arousing voodoo drums and instances of irrational ape-like anger. Morgan’s ultimate insight shows Idi Amin enjoying the porn film Deep Throat but wondering if it’s plausible. His doctor friend gets the last ironic word: “All aberrations of nature are possible.”