Liberal Talk Radio

I got a chance to see The Last King of Scotland the other day (it opens sometime next week) and although I shouldn’t be guessing Oscar stuff — especially this early and especially because I usually suck at it — you can’t help but think that Forest Whitaker will win for his depiction of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.

The movie itself is just about as good, although I think it will read a lot better ten or twenty years from now when film historians finally wrap up what was notable during this post-9/11, post-Iraq period.

The film is smart in that it focuses on the Scottish protagonist whom Idi Amin befriends/recruits to be his personal doctor rather than Amin himself. Through the course of the film we see Amin’s regime through the eyes of a character who is in turn idealistic and naive about, disbelieving of, and finally impotent in terms of acting against Amin. As a symbol of the way the West — on both the right and left — treated/treats non-Western regimes, it’s a powerful one.

By following the Scottish protagonist, Dr. Nicholas Garrigan (who is not himself “the Last King of Scotland”), as opposed to Amin himself, the viewer becomes charmed by Amin’s magnetic personality along with Garrigan. When it eventually becomes clear what a whackjob Amin turns out to be, you yourself are almost implicated in allowing Amin to become a tyrannical mass murderer. The film is smart that way.

Not to reveal too much, but suffice it to say, Garrigan makes a mess of things, which basically mirrors the narrative of the West screwing over all the less-than-Western countries along the way.

It’s not about Iraq or Afghanistan, but it’s hard not to see the film’s resonance in 2006** as the U.S. attempts to clean up after dictatorial and/or totalitarian regimes that it in part helped foster/tolerate on some level along the way. Yeah, it wasn’t smart in the long run for the British to prop up Amin, but can you blame them for wanting to get rid of him as well? See also: Hussein, Saddam.

In a week where various demagogues*** charm and confound the West while their citizens get screwed, The Last King of Scotland will be one of the smarter films that attempt to describe this era.

*Is it wrong to embark on a semi-serious discussion of foreign affairs through the lens of film? Maybe . . . just not today, not when the biggest, most ridiculous media event of the year just took place at the United Nations****.

**Which is to say maybe 2006 is better for this story than 1998, when the original book was released. The New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani, for example, was uncomfortable with the story at the time:

In the end, the reader remains mystified by Garrigan’s bizarre affection for Amin in the face of so many horrors: his suggestion that his own Scottish heritage made him susceptible to Amin’s claims to be the ”last King of the Scots” remains absurd, as is his suggestion that Amin’s charisma is nearly impossible to resist.

Worse, the comic tone of much of this novel overshadows the reality of the horrors actually committed in the Uganda of Idi Amin. Although Mr. Foden does a vivid job of describing the decapitated bodies, the mutilated corpses, the unspeakable crimes committed by Amin’s henchmen, such scenes essentially become a suspenseful backdrop for Garrigan’s bumbling adventures.

Midway through ”The Last King of Scotland,” one of Mr. Foden’s characters says of Idi Amin’s antics: ”It would be quite funny if it weren’t for the thousands of people who are dying. All these silly larks of his, it’s like pornography. If you laugh at it, you’re stepping over the corpses.” The same might well be said of this clever, fluently written — but ultimately perverse — novel.

***Which is the better of the two? It’s tough. There’s the repugnant Holocaust revisionism of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

Never raising his voice and thanking each questioner with a tone that oozed polite hostility, he spent 40 minutes questioning the evidence that the Holocaust ever happened — “I think we should allow more impartial studies to be done on this,” he said after hearing an account of an 81-year-old member, the insurance mogul Maurice R. Greenberg, who saw the Dachau concentration camp as Germany fell . . .

And then there’s Hugo Chávez’s swagger and flair:

But compared with Mr. Ahmadinejad, Mr. Chávez was just more colorful. He brandished a copy of Noam Chomsky’s “Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance” and recommended it to members of the General Assembly to read. Later, he told a news conference that one of his greatest regrets was not getting to meet Mr. Chomsky before he died. (Mr. Chomsky, 77, is still alive.)

At that same news conference, just after his speech, he made eyes at a pretty Colombian journalist who asked him why he went around calling President Bush names. “Are you Colombian?” Mr. Chávez asked, performing a quick merengue move with his upper body and flashing her a grin.

He suggested that Americans read Mr. Chomsky’s book instead of spending all their time “watching Superman and Batman” movies.

I wonder who will play Chávez in the film version . . .

****And I’m still upset about all the gridlock!