FILM: King and Queen

The Last King of Scotland
The Queen







Whitaker as Amin,
and Mirren as Elisabeth II

By Steve Vineberg

As Idi Amin Dada in The Last King of Scotland, Forest Whitaker gives one of the most immense performances I’ve ever seen. Everything about him, from his frame to his belly laugh and the way his emotions erupt across the broad map of his face, seems larger than life.

Most of the actors who have given memorable portrayals of real-life personalities in recent years (Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash, Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes, Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles, Geoffrey Rush as Peter Sellers, and others) have taken an intimate approach, building their characters psychologically, but this movie isn’t especially interested in Amin’s background and Whitaker doesn’t pause to take us through his motivation. He understands Amin as a man of enormous appetites and feelings, a figure dominating a canvas. The canvas, of course, is Uganda, the leadership of which he seized from chief minister Milton Obote in a military coup in 1971 that was enthusiastically applauded by the population. Amin was a populist icon, a demagogue—one of those charismatic men who manage mysteriously to persuade his people that he’s one of them while indisputably towering above them. He was also a monster who managed to slaughter 300,000 of his people before the Tanzanians finally drove him out of Uganda in 1979 after capturing Kampala, its capital city.

The man who gave himself, among other titles, “His Excellency for Life” and “Lord of the All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea” is a role for an actor of majestic expressiveness, and that describes Whitaker. He should have become a movie star nearly 20 years ago, when Clint Eastwood cast him as Charlie Parker in Bird, but it was a terrible movie and though he was on screen for mostly all of its nearly three-hour running time, the role was oddly underwritten. But the character performances he gave in some of the smaller films that followed A Rage in Harlem, Johnny Handsome, and especially Downtown were distinguished for their unusual emotional intensity. He’s shown up in dozens of pictures since, as well as TV series (earlier this year he shot half a dozen episodes of The Shield, and he was first-rate in a guest appearance on last week’s episode of ER), but The Last King of Scotland may mark the first time he’s made it onto most moviegoers’ radar.

Whitaker’s Amin is at the heart of the movie, but he’s not its protagonist. That’s Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy), the Scottish medical-school graduate with an adventurous spirit who winds up in Uganda because he closes his eyes and spins a globe, vowing to travel wherever his finger points. Garrigan lands a job at a rural clinic, working with a British doctor (Adam Kotz) and his attractive wife Sarah (Gillian Anderson, luminous in a brief role), and arriving just as Amin is taking over the country. Young, romantic, and impatient, with more than a little bravado of his own, and very much a product of his insurrectionary time, Nicholas is entranced by Amin’s charisma and taken in by his grass-roots appeal. He admires him for his stated aim to raise the standard of living for Ugandans, and for his disdain for the British, who are, in Nicholas’s mind, a race of stuffy, constipated, racist bureaucrats. He convinces Sarah—whom he’s been attempting to court in her husband’s temporary absence—to go out to see Amin address the locals in their area, and cheers along with them. (Sarah is more circumspect.) When Amin’s car hits a cow on the road on his way back to Kampala, Nicholas finds himself pressed into service to treat Amin's injured hand, and his efficiency makes a favorable impression on the leader. So does Nicholas's daring: When the bellowing of the struck cow grows unbearable, Nicholas grabs Amin’s own gun and plugs the suffering animal on the spot. It’s a wonder Amin’s soldiers don’t shoot him for disarming their general, but Amin is so struck by Garrigan’s nerve that he calls on him again and then offers him a post as his private physician.

The movie, which was adapted by Jeremy Brock, Peter Morgan, and Joe Penhall from Giles Foden’s novel, is a loss-of-innocence story, and through its first act it’s just about perfect. The director, Kevin McDonald, takes his time settling in; he lets the vivid, overheated colors of the landscape seep into your skin (the marvelous cinematography is by Anthony Dod Mantle) while the pace of life in the African countryside takes hold. He and McAvoy (who played the faun, Mr. Tumnus, in last year’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) get Nicholas’s youthful impetuousness, his sexual energy, his leftist zeal; you see exactly how he’s taken in by Amin’s comradely warmth, his robust humor, his generosity, his trust, and his insistence on treating Nicholas, almost immediately, as a confidant. (And he’s certainly not pure enough to resist the thrill of being in the constant company of a celebrity, and one who doesn’t mind throwing such gifts his way as a sexy new car.)

The movie is so wonderful at first that when it goes bad you experience the drop-off as an almost physical disappointment. That happens around the time Nicholas realizes that the man he’s put his faith in is killing off hundreds of perceived enemies—and, in that Macbeth-like way of tyrants, sooner or later he sees almost everyone as an enemy. As Garrigan becomes implicated in Amin’s paranoia and violence, the script becomes melodramatic, shifting from event to event so quickly it feels truncated. Meanwhile McDonald abandons his wide, inclusive visual style for a lot of close-ups and fast, jagged editing, and dispatches his leisurely storytelling for hype. The movie becomes lurid, garish. When Nicholas falls into a romance with one of Amin’s wives, Kay (the superb Kerry Washington), McDonald shoots their love scene with a distracted feverishness; he forgets to depict its sensuality and to underscore the lovers' feelings.

What holds it together is Forest Whitaker—the way he drenches himself in Amin's every emotional color, letting it soak the air around him, yet moving from one to the other with terrifying rapidity and completeness. Even though it’s impossible to watch a dramatization of Amin’s rule now without a consciousness of what a bloody dictator he was—and even though the pierce of Whitaker’s gaze when Garrigan seizes his gun is enough to make a viewer wary (you think, God, testosterone can blind a young man)—you can’t help being as amused as Nicholas by his earthy humor and as mesmerized by the warm immediacy of his presence. It takes a long time for Nicholas to believe fully that he’s in the employ of a monster, and by the time he does he finds that Amin’s fatherly affection has enclosed him like a vise. And then when he turns on Nicholas, the force of his fury feels like an earthquake. It’s truly a great performance.

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Peter Morgan gets the sole writing credit on The Queen, which Stephen Frears directed, but unlike The Last King of Scotland it contains scarcely a false note.

This movie, which focuses on the royal family of England in the days following Princess Diana’s fatal car crash in 1997, is a genuine surprise. You might expect a juicy satirical comedy that takes shots at the uptight royals for their treatment of the princess and their long, conspicuous silence in the wake of her death. What you don’t expect is a sensitive, compassionate portrait of Queen Elizabeth (Helen Mirren). The movie isn’t a snow job, either—Frears and Morgan don’t pretend that Elizabeth and Prince Philip (James Cromwell) feel more charity toward Diana than they would be likely to toward a woman who had no compunction about airing their son’s dirty laundry. But though Philip comes across as a snob and a clod—a characterization that doesn’t seem out of line—Elizabeth turns out to be an intelligent, contemplative, and complex figure (just as she did in Alan Bennett’s marvelous 1991 television drama A Question of Attribution, where she was played by Prunella Scales), and the filmmakers use her to address the subject of what it means to be English and a monarch at the end of the millennium. The Queen is the sort of movie you could imagine David Lean making if he were still alive.

In the early scenes, Elizabeth’s reticence to have a public response to Diana’s death or to leave the Windsor estate in rural Balmoral for Buckingham Palace, where she can be in the public eye and close to the widespread mourning for the princess, comes across as obstinacy and even pique. She and Philip appear irritated by the effusion of sentiment over Diana—especially Philip, who’s constantly rolling his eyes at the media blitz. And our reflex exasperation at the queen’s refusal to add to the general air of grief is fueled by our sense that some combination of her own dislike of Diana and a naturally withholding temperament makes her incapable of extending any sympathy to Charles (Alex Jennings), who, whatever his mixed feelings about his ex-wife, is clearly devastated by the news. We probably view her much as does Tony Blair (Michael Sheen), who has only recently become prime minister. (The movie begins with his election in early summer and then leaps ahead to the car crash a few months later.) As the Windsors stay out of London and out of camera range, as they decline to fly the British flag at half-mast above Buckingham Palace, Blair asks his staff, “Can no one save these royals from themselves?” and urges Elizabeth to reconsider how their conduct is alienating the British people.

But the filmmakers linger with the Windsors at Balmoral, and little by little we come to see how little the media excoriation and popular resentment of Elizabeth capture her essence. Cherie Blair (Helen McCrory) makes cracks about the royals luxuriating on their 40,000-acre country estate, and yes, the landscape of Balmoral is beauteous (especially as shot by the aptly named Affonso Beato). But the Windsors aren’t luxuriant people, exactly, though they ride and hunt and do many of the things that the English aristocracy has done for centuries. Their no-nonsense efficiency as they handle the day-to-day details of the grounds, the way Elizabeth supervises meals and takes Blair’s calls (reluctantly) in the middle of tea, her exchanges with her mother (Sylvia Syms) all have a very 1940s wartime air. Angry about how she's being told to act over Diana's death, the queen accidentally drives her car into a highland stream and gets mired there. She has to call the groundsman to rescue her, then reminds him that she was a mechanic during the war.

This bit of information makes us smile—not only because of its incongruousness but also because we can just see it. And I think this identification of Elizabeth with the Blitz helps open her up to us. To the wartime world, the Windsors—Elizabeth and her mother and her father, King George—represented all the old Victorian English virtues: dignity, politesse, resoluteness, stick-to-it-iveness, pragmatism, hard work and, through it all, an unstinting stoicism. When you see how those values were romanticized in the tearjerkers of the 1940s, it’s easy to find them wearying and impossible. There are so many reasons to find fault with England in the final decades of the empire that our immediate reaction to those values—especially as Americans—may be to make fun of them. But as a code of conduct to meet the challenges of the Second World War, they’re rather impressive. Elizabeth took the throne as the empire was disintegrating, so there has always been a natural tension between this icon of an anachronistic monarchy and the age over which she has—officially, at least—reigned. But you can’t blame her for remaining true to her nature, her family and the royal tradition. And that’s where The Queen comes down—as does (surprising even himself) Tony Blair.

Helen Mirren’s brash, earthy Queen Elizabeth I in the HBO movie earlier this year lacked nuance, though the problem was probably mostly in the script’s conception of the character. By contrast, she gives a delicately layered performance as Elizabeth II that ranks with the most brilliant work she’s ever done. She manages to play a woman who staunchly keeps her own counsel, but provides just enough of a window into the queen's feelings to allow us to comprehend her behavior. That is, she illuminates a mystery without solving it. Mirren makes us feel the dilemma of a ruler who suddenly finds that because the restrained behavior she models is no longer resonant with her people, her continued adherence to it diverges, as she never thought it would, from a carefully inculcated, lifelong commitment to serving that people. (To her astonishment, her subjects have no reticence about crying in front of the camera as they talk about why they idolized Diana.)

When, with no alternative, she finally breaks down and makes an appearance with Philip in London and walks past the flowers and memorials from the many who adored Diana, she sees that some of the messages express anger at the royal family, viewing them as Diana’s enemies. “You were too good for them,” these notes say, and “They destroyed your life.” Mirren shows how wounded Elizabeth is by these furious darts without ever lowering the character’s expertly arranged façade. Sheen, Syms, Roger Allam as the Queen’s private secretary, Robin Janvrin, and especially Jennings (a multiple Olivier Award winner who is not as well known to American audiences) are superb, and Cromwell and McCrory contribute their technically finesse in less subtle roles. But Mirren is staggering.

She plays her best scene with a stag the queen encounters in the hills of Balmoral. Philip has been taking their grandsons hunting as a way to distract them in their grief, and he’s reported back to her about a towering stag, the most magnificent seen in those parts in years. Then one day, alone and without warning, she comes across it and is profoundly stirred by the spectacle. It’s clear that we’re meant to see the creature as an emblem of Elizabeth—regal, improbable, out of its time—and that she herself recognizes a kinship with it. Later comes a scene that answers this one—hearing that the guest of a local lord has brought the stag down, she goes to see the animal’s body. That echoing scene is probably unnecessary, and the only level on which it works is the symbolic one (which is to say that it doesn’t work at all). But the earlier episode in which she views it alive, implicitly claiming the landscape as its own, is breathtaking.

Perhaps Elizabeth II is not a queen to evoke grandeur, but Mirren unquestionably is.