Celluloid Heroes

If you’re afraid of dying it shows you have a life worth living.

Portraits of living people are hard enough, as Helen Mirren accomplished splendidly in The Queen, but it’s debatable whether or not Forest Whitaker had a harder time portraying the notorious Ugandan strongman Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland. While the real Amin is both dead and less well known to Western audiences than the British monarch, Whitaker had to walk a fine line in playing a man who was simultaneously a butcher and a darkly comic caricature. That the actor was able to a walk off with the Best Actor Oscar, despite not playing the lead role, is testament to his success. Whitaker dominates this movie, which is fortunate. This film is exceedingly well-made, but suffers problems that are mostly a necessary result of its structure.

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Will someone please save these people from themselves!

The Queen is the story of the near-eternal struggle between tradition and modernity. The bare plot outline of Stephen Frear’s thoughtful portrait of the Great Britain in the throes of that struggle probably does not excite the casual moviegoer, but this quietly engrossing drama is anything but dull or sedate.

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