Amin: The Rise and Fall

Amin: The Rise and Fall

This is a very inquisitive film; it’s not a documentary, nor is it a drama. It has actors perform real events, but doesn’t try to tie them into anything about Idi Amin. There’s lots of brutal violence yet it’s not an exploitation movie. When the credits rolled, I still had no idea why this film exists. And yet “Amin: The Rise and Fall” is less bad than its imponderable strangeness suggests it’s a weird movie even by the standards of the genre that gives you Gary Busey as a drug-crazed rock ‘n’ roll drummer. But there might be something here after all, some method behind this madness that only seems random.  

It’s like a biographer’s notebook, or one of those books about Hitler where they explain how he loved dogs and never liked to wear socks with his sandals. It tells us more things about Idi Amin than we really need to know, but can any movie tell us too much about Idi Amin? The film starts on the wrong foot by making us think it’s going to be told from the point of view of a black Ugandan surgeon who repeatedly tells us he plans to leave the country before the end of this story.

He does indeed take off for good long before the credits roll (and good for him), but what was his story? Was there supposed to be one? The surgeon invites his friends over for dinner with him and his wife so he can talk at great length about Amin (which sets up convenient transitions into flashbacks). A white British journalist falls in love with their daughter although that feels obligatory because movies like this always have at least one completely irrelevant white guy.

And then there’s Joseph Olita as Idi himself. Olita bears such an uncanny resemblance to Amin that you’ll be shocked to learn this Ugandan actor played the part of Amin in “Raid on Entebbe” and later reprised the role in a one-man show. And yet Olita’s performance is not an imitation of Amin but a haunting evocation, as though he were channeling some demonic spirit who, cruel irony, didn’t want to be bothered with any actual acting.  

Olita captures perfectly that queasy combination of menace and buffoonery that made Amin so fearsome and laughable. The real-life Amin was a huge man who loomed over almost everybody else yet he had the air of a little boy. He swaggered instead of marching to military music (because he couldn’t). When an offended European diplomatic delegation tries to leave the country, he tries to mend their feelings by playing them songs on a concertina. He loves to dress up in strange costumes and wear funny hats.  

And yes, that crazed killer also raped, shot, stabbed and crushed many innocent people including some with whom he had only the most casual acquaintanceship. We see him order the deaths of two wives (one was already dead), mutilate one wife’s body and then exhibit it before her children — before having sex with two women at once.  

All this is familiar territory for us if not for Joseph Kony or Dominic Ongwen: There have been movies about Amin before. But I can’t think of another movie (or anything) that feels like “Amin: The Rise and Fall.” It’s absurdly hilarious when it doesn’t mean to be; it’s absurdly horrifying when it means only to be ridiculous. This is the same kind of epic disaster as “Valley of the Dolls,” except without any pills or dolls or much else that might make sense. In other words: This movie is bonkers from start to finish.

We have heard many of these stories from years of television news. The raid on Entebbe, the negotiations for the life of a sick British woman. Amin’s demand that the queen of England herself come to Uganda and beg his forgiveness: It feels like a half-remembered dream. The filmmakers don’t try very hard to get inside the dream and explain Amin but then who could? The movie’s most haunting moments are when Amin steps to a podium to announce one of his latest mad schemes, and then, as his listeners cringe in disbelief, repeats his favorite catch-phrase: “Thank you all very much! Thank you all very much! Thank you all very much indeed!”

This isn’t the first film about the man who called himself Idi Amin Dada, Conqueror of the British Empire. Six years ago West German filmmaker Barbet Schroeder made a documentary based on footage shot by Amin himself, who presents himself to the camera as a charming con artist. That movie couldn’t show us what was being done in Amin’s name it certainly couldn’t show us what we see here but it gave us an idea that this man might be evil cloaked in charm.

I’m reminded of “The Confessions of Winifred Wagner,” in which the widow of the director of Bayreuth remembered Adolf Hitler as a perfect houseguest whom her children adored.

Is there any reason to see “Amin”? I doubt it unless you’re fascinated by this man. But when I saw it Sunday night at United Artists on Michigan Avenue (80 percent full), I had given up hope; it was just another movie about violence and scandal for me.

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