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Macdonald brings a documentary sensibility to The Last King of Scotland, shooting almost the entire film in Uganda; at the Vancouver International Film Festival, he said it was the first film to be shot in that country in years, maybe ever, and it even makes use of the actual limousine and swimming pool that Amin himself once used. Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, who has worked on recent films by Danny Boyle (Millions) and Lars von Trier (Dogville), employs a sometimes jerky hand-held style that accentuates the realism and creates a sense of foreboding instability.

Amin was fond of all things Scottish, including wearing kilts

The performances are universally strong, as well—though the film's documentary-like realism is arguably hampered by the fact that the story revolves around a fictitious character like Garrigan, who not only witnesses Amin's historical deeds, but becomes actively, if unintentionally, involved in making them happen.

Yes, one of Amin's wives met the gruesome fate depicted here, but her reputed lover at the time was a doctor named Mbalu Mukasa. And yes, Amin's reputation (glossed over by foreign journalists who enjoyed his press-conference shtick) took a serious blow in the late 1970s, when an insider wrote a book about him—but that insider was Henry Kyemba, a former health minister. In this film, on the other hand, a black colleague tells Garrigan he wants to help him escape the country so that he can tell the world what Amin is really like: "They will believe you, you are a white man." So for all the film's post-colonial subtext, it does little to challenge the idea that the stories that matter are the ones in which the white man takes centre stage.

1. Do you think Garrigan learns anything over the course of this story? About Uganda? About himself? What does he learn? Do you think he becomes a better person? What responsibility does he bear, if any, for the atrocities he witnesses
2. Do you think the film explores the politics of that time deeply enough? Why do you think the film makes so much of the main character's Scottishness? How are the British portrayed? Good, evil, or a mixture? What kind of mixture
3. Why do you think Idi Amin is so fascinated with Scottish culture, even as he celebrates the rise of African culture?

The Last King of Scotland is rated R for some strong violence and gruesome images (including scenes of execution, ambush attacks, dismembered human bodies, and an animal being put out of its misery), sexual content (including male and female nudity) and language (about a dozen f-words, and a few instances of swearing.) Two characters also talk about getting an abortion.

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© Peter T. Chattaway 2006, subject to licensing agreement with Christianity Today International. All rights reserved. Click for reprint information.

Director Kevin Macdonald, who brought us the survival story Touching the Void, dramatizes the murderous malevolence of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in his adaptation of Giles Foden's novel The Last King of Scotland.

James McAvoy—the actor who played Mr. Tumnus in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe—stars as a misguided Scotsman who becomes Amin's personal physician. But the film's strongest virtue is the performance by Forest Whitaker as the dictator.

While Scotland gives us a behind-the-scenes look at Amin's turbulent reign, critics aren't exactly sure if anything profound is revealed in the process.

David DiCerto (Catholic News Service) says the film "serves as an indictment of inhumanity and hatred wrapped in a fairly compelling parable that asks: What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world—let alone a palace in Uganda—and loses his soul?" He praises Whitaker, saying that he "captures both Amin's magnetism and megalomania, manically flipping between charm and rage and investing even a subtle eye flutter with deadly meaning. The result is a fascinating, if terrifying, portrait of monstrous cruelty that demands attention come Oscar time."

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