October 29, 2006
the last king of scotland
One goes to watch the purported star do his thing, but for the most part can't see the Forest for the trees. Or not even: the view to his predictably wracked and troubling performance isn't obscured by a larger, holistic view of the Ugandan Seventies, but by, natch, someone else's story.
That social struggles ought be told as the dramas of individuals, and that this rule takes on force in direct proportion to the money involved in the telling, is not news, and would scarcely be worth mentioning except for how certainly it means to escape both mention and notice as a rule of art in the current dispensation. But we can at least take note of what is allowed and even demanded by this iron rule: the dominating form of the close-up, the apotheosizing of individual performance (which might otherwise have been left as a relic of the stage, had cinema taken up the formal possibilities available to it). So, in short, all there is to do, all there ever will be, is to enjoy individual performance and camera moves (in which we include various special effects).
But the effects of this cinematic determination are just as marked in the social activities depicted in the film. Surely it must be notable that the narration of the fall of Idi Amin (or at least the collapse of his regime's credibility) pivots, in this film, not around the political or the social but the personal. Even this is unexceptional, not worth mentioning, other than the fact that "the personal" narration of the political climaxes here — in way that would make even Faulkner blanch — in the fact of miscegenation.
This, finally, is a quite ludicrous structuration, even within the context of single-subject cinema: less a story of Africans getting fucked by the white man than yet another projection of the boundless historical power of the white dick. The best one could hope for in this movie, in other words, is to watch an actor's attempt to inhabit a consciousness unfamiliar both to him and to us, and to see what that might be like; one gets a bit of this, and its pleasure. For the most part, however, one endures not the worst but finally the most predictable substitute, a kind of "idea" that has the force of perfect idiocy.
Posted by jane at October 29, 2006 07:12 AM | TrackBack