Watched: The Last King of Scotland

It's strange watching this movie after having read the book last semester. Even though Whittaker really gives an exceptionally creepy performance as Idi Amin and adorable litttle pocket-Scot James McAvoy is affectively naive, brash, and then frightened as his personal doctor and "trusted advisor" (sometimes. As with most despots, his favor with Amin waxes and wanes throughout the film), this movie didn't quite do it for me. The tone's not quite right, it starts out too breezy and feel-good party times and cuts out too many interesting subplots. I know, I know, how novel! How different from the usual complaints of bibliophiles against Hollywood's many adapatative vagaries! And yes I recognize that adaptative isn't a word. So sue me.  

First of all, I don't really blame them for cutting out most of the British government espionage bits because those were a little muddled in the book anyway. One too many shadowy, double-speak filled meetings to be truly interesting. And I understand cutting out the whole Israeli spy angle from the love interest story. But not including the McAvoy's Garrigan running half-naked through the jungle, discovering the mass graves for himself, or his eerie final encounter alone with Amin, where Amin finally reveals to him just how much he knows about what Garrigan's been doing and what's actually going on in Uganda, weakens a lot of what made the book nauseatingly eerie. What's left is one hour of a pseduo-picaresque origin story of unobservant  playboy doctor who blindly rises in the ranks of Amin's administration and then about 45 minutes of "things going badly". It's not a bad or badly made movie at all, but like I said, it doesn't quite capture, like the book does, the sense of claustrophobia and impending doom that sets in from the moment Garrigan lands in Uganda and lingers decades later when Amin, out of the blue, calls him up on his phone out in the wilds of Scotland, where he has hidden himself away to live out the rest of his life and attempt to die as quietly as possible...

A totally unsettling end that would have been perfect in the movie version, completely ignored. Too bad.