First Word

The title probably scares a lot of movie-browsers off — another boring European period piece –, giving no hint that actually it is a story about the life of Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker) during his 1970’s rule of Uganda. The story purports to be historical fiction, that is, a true story about real characters that is amplified by fictional persons and events. Here, a fictional young Scottish doctor begins his career in medical service in Uganda, and gets taken up as Amin’s personal physician, and thus becomes the foil for telling the real story of Amin.

Our emotional response to Amin is manipulated in an arc that fairly accurately mirrors actual world opinion during that period. Initially, we are filled with sympathy for Amin, who appears affable, generous, altruistic toward his people, and humorous. By the end, we are led to see him as a genocidal barbarian justly thrown off the pinnacle of power. This arc is paralleled by that of the young Scottish “Dr Nicholas Garrigan” (James McAvoy), who begins in a posture of admiring service, finds himself sucked into betraying an associate on slim evidence, and finally recoils from the one he now sees as a monster.

The good doctor himself is oddly African in his sexual mores. He copulates with a young Negress he meets on the bus on initial entry into Uganda, later tries to seduce the wife of his colleague, and eventually bangs one of Amin’s wives. The latter unfortunately becomes pregnant, so a secret abortion is naturally called for. It is too risky to perform in the easily-discovered nice hospital, so the girl resorts to a village butcher. But Amin finds out anyway, and orders her killed and mutilated. That is the turning point. That is when we first realize just what a monster Amin is.

We do?

Rather than feeling sympathy for the twice-betrayed husband, we are manipulated into seeing Amin as anti-woman, who would force women to have to resort to back-alley butchers to get their rightful abortions, who had no sympathy for the delicate feelings of his neglected wife that led her to seek solace and penetration by his right-hand man.

And to add insult to injury, that meany has the audacity to wreak vengeance on Dr Garrigan when the latter is discovered trying to poison him!

But we really really know that Amin is bad when he sides with the Palestinians against Israel, leading to the well-known commando raid by Israel.

If a man is depicted as evil by an entirely amoral but politically-correct foil, we have learned to smell a jew hovering nearby. And sure enough, screenwriter Peter Morgan né Morgenthau is jewish, born to a “holocaust survivor.” But the final proof is having the protaganist indignantly blurt out our Savior’s name juxtaposed by the F-word, not once, but twice. To which, when you hear it, you hereby have my permission to shout back at the screen, “jewish f-cking kikes!”

If Amin was really a murderous tyrant as the final footage insinuates, we must of course condemn him. On the other hand, as with Saddam Hussein, if the number of his victims can only be “estimated” with numbers that range over an order of magnitude, we should probably withhold judgment pending a final investigation that can be more specific. (It is probably for this reason that the holocaustians are so terrified of Rassinier’s estimate of 1.2 million for the jewish “holocaust.” Anyone who publicly entertains such a notion should be beaten, black-listed, ridiculed, or imprisoned.)

X-file girl Gillian Anderson is surprisingly beautiful in the role of the almost-seduced wife of Garrigan’s doctor colleague. I give it a “one” because well-done in many ways, and for some background historical orientation; but beware of extreme jewy obscene imagery and degraded morals from start to finish. Not for the family. And by that, I mean not for anyone, except for educational purposes.