The Last King of Scotland

When the various premium movie packages have free preview weekends, I tend to DVR a lot of movies, and watch them when they'll be coming up on TV at a later date. Today, for example, I'll recommend The Last King of Scotland, which is going to be on Thriller Max tomorrow afternoon at 4:19 PM, with a couple more airings on various channels in the Cinemax packae later in the week.

James McAvoy plays Nicholas Garrigan, a man who as the movie opens is celebrating having completed medical school and becoming a dotor in the Scotland of late 1970. He wants to serve humanity, so he decides he's going to select at random where he's going to be a doctor, which is what leads him to pick Uganda, much to the consternation of his parents.

So Dr. Garrigan flies off to Uganda, to be picked up by Sarah Merrit (Gillian Anderson in a small role), the wife of the doctor who runs the charity for which Garrigan is going to work. Except that as Garrigan lands in the country, he finds that there is a lot of military on the roads leading to the capital, which is the result of a military coup that has replaced dictator Milton Obote with general Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker). Frankly I'm amazed that planes still would have been landing in the middle of a military coup, but while Idi Amin was of course a real person and actually had a personal physician from Scotland during part of his rule, the story is highly fictionalized to say the least.

Sarah must have seen Cary Grant in the movie Crisis, so she knows that overthrowing a dictator in a coup doesn't necessarily lead to liberty for the people. But Dr. Garrigan is shockingly naïve. He attends one of Amin's speeches to the people, and is completely taken in by Amin's rhetoric. On their way back to the clinic, Sarah and Nick run into the stopped motorcade of Amin, which hit a cow, resulting in Amin getting a sprained wrist.

It's an injuy that isn't serious, but with a new military president and an unstable political situation, it's no surprise that Amin and his handlers are afraid of what's going to happen while they're stopped. They're lucky that a western doctor just happened to be behind them, and Dr. Nick treats Amin, who likes Nick's Scotland T-shirt.

Eventually, Dr. Nick is summoned to see Amin, who has decided he wants Nick to be his family's personal physician. This isn't at all what Dr. Nick thought he would be getting into when he picked Uganda, but I can imagine that a gilded cage might seem better than a middle-of-nowhere clinic, and of course Nick is naïve, so unsurprisingly he ditches the Merrits and takes Idi Amin up on his offer. (I suppose it could also have been the proverbial offer you can't refuse.)

Nick quickly finds out that there are going to be some problems with Amin. One is that medical knowledge is much less advanced in Uganda, at least among people who aren't doctors. Nick gets a call from one of Amin's wives who lives in a compound away from the presidential compound, where he discovers that one of the wife's sons is having a seizure that's the result of epilepsy. It's a disease that's controllable, but in a country like Uganda the folk belief is that an epileptic is someone who should be cast away, which is why the wife and kid are living away from the rest of Amin's retinue.

A bigger problem, however, is that Amin is flighty at best, and maliciously capricious at worst. When Amin flies off for a summit with another African leader, he asks that Dr. Garrigan head a meeting of western architects who have designs for a new government building. It's not anything that Dr. Nick is suited to do, but Idi asks, and it's best not to piss off Idi too much. So Nick does head the meeting, and it leads to Amin taking Nick even further into his confidence.

But being this close to a capricious dictator can get quite dangerous. Although the real brutality of Amin's rule is mostly not shown, one thing that is more clearly displayed is Amin's expulsion from Uganda of all the South Asians, who had been in the country for a good three generations having been brought by the British to construct the railroads in Uganda (something mentioned in the movie Mississippi Masala). This pisses off Nick, whose tailor is part of the Indian community that gets expelled. But eventually, Nick discovers that his passport has been confiscated, making an exit from the country complicated.

Although The Last King of Scotland does take a fair amount of liberty with history, it's certainly a worthwhile movie. Forest Whitaker is excellent as the ruler who becomes more and more evil over the course of the movie. McAvoy also does well, although I have a problem with his character being so naïve.

One interesting thing I noticed in the closing credits is that there was a fair amount of filming done in Uganda, which somewhat surprised me, as I wasn't certain how the Ugandan government would have viewed a movie like this, especially since the Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni, had been involved in coups that toppled both Idi Amin, and the second Milton Obote administration. But the location shooting greatly enhances the movie.

Amazon lists a DVD release of The Last King of Scotland as being in stock, as well as being available on Prime streaming. For whatever reason, the TCM Shop doesn't list the DVD as being available.