THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
AMIN, AMEN THE SCREEN In a crazy way, Clint Eastwood and Idi Amin invite comparison. Eastwood is a star, of course, and currently, in The Outlaw Josey Wales, the director of his movie as well....
...In The Outlaw Josey Wales, Eastwood pointedly has no audible lines in the first scene which sets the premise for the whole film...
...It is almost as if Eastwood was trying to reconcile the merciless westerner he has originated with the older, more nostalgic hero of the sort John Ford perfected...
...Whether it's fiction or documentary makes no difference...
...Where such a glance is in Eastwood a cue to decisive action, a sign of calm and control, it is in Amin a momentary retreat, a sudden sign of vulnerability and weakness...
...Until recently, Amin has been rather less than that: the mere dictator of his own country, Uganda...
...Yet while less successful as a director's tour de force than Eastwood's film, Schroeder's is still more interesting...
...Eastwood's purpose is to soften his image a bit, to render himself more human...
...Like the last Western Eastwood directed, High Plains Drifter, this new film is a crude sort of revenge tragedy in which Eastwood is at pains to have us admire not only the hero's exploits, but the hero himself...
...Eastwood has made his career as a practitioner of pure violence, a man whose character is made up of proficiencies rather than sentiments...
...Like all big stars, on his film Amin got the right of final cut, which he at one point threatened to administer to the throats of Uganda's entire French population unless Schroeder edited something out...
...But now, in Barbet Schroeder's Idi Amin Dada, Amin has become a movie star too, and it is here that a comparison with Eastwood forces itself upon us...
...But after all the braggadocio and sweet talk in the film, it is just not enough to usurp Amin...
...In Idi Amin Dada, Amin is also trying to soften his image, to appear a more likable, sociable fellow, and like Eastwood, unfortunately, he succeeds...
...and besides, he says, "By the end of the film, . . . you can feel that this man is a murderer, and you have discovered it slowly, slowly, all by yourself...
...But his buffoonery is as disarming as his charm...
...At worst Amin betrays himself for a buffoon, as when he goes on ludicrous maneuvers with his troops...
...It is an undeniably winning stunt...
...The look in those eyes seems almost exactly the same one we see in Eastwood's eyes from time to time...
...He allowed Schroeder to make the film because he wanted an official, authorized biography, and the great difficulty is that it comes too close to being just that...
...Amin is charming, Schroeder counters...
...Nonetheless, Amin's own purpose in making the film is to do for his image pretty much what Eastwood is trying to do for his in The Outlaw Josey Wales...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...It is in their stardom, where their lives overlap, that they seem to throw each other into relief...
...Schroeder first has to prime the pump by telling us that the conference of Uganda's physicians Amin addresses in this scene is a tougher audience than he is used to...
...Typical of his effort is a scene where Amin takes Schroeder for a boat ride along the banks of one of Uganda's great lakes and hails all the animals-rogue elephants, crocodiles, etc.-he finds taking their ease there...
...It's surprising that crocodiles and rogue elephants will give this beast the time of day...
...At this moment Schroeder turns up the mike so we can hear Amin's respiration, and he zooms in, as the suggestion unfolds, for a close-up of Amin's fingers picking at one of his rings and his eyes shifting quickly over the rest of the audience...
...This is what is called in the business "artistic differences," and Amin's prevailing in this particular incident must lead us to conclude that he is responsible for his own performance in the film...
...He talks to the animals...
...But in this latest Western, he finds a new and gentler self-within...
...In Amin it is the reverse...
...He even spits on a mangy, defenseless dog at one point...
...In such a man, a glance like this is virtually an eruption into action...
...In The Outlaw Josey Wales, we know Eastwood by his actions...
...There is no opposition or challenge that Schroeder can define him against, and as a result his charm remains charm...
...But finally one of the doctors actually does have the nerve to suggest, however circuitously and respectfully, a change in Amin's public health policies...
...In so far as it does this, Schroeder's film simply misleads us...
...This fellow Amin, we think, is a veritable Dr...
...It only makes him seem ineffectual, which he isn't, at least not as a despot...
...What allows us to perceive Eastwood's true nature is the pressure of the outside events...
...In the end, the gestures in which Schroeder would capture Amin's true character are even the same ones to which Eastwood often resorts...
...When you take into account the constraints Schroeder worked under, this scene is a real coup d'etat...
...If for no other reason, this is so because it is, considering its subject matter, closer to being a unique work...
...It still allows him to get away with murder...
...It is in the role each plays in his own, extraordinary fiction, in the personality each has on the screen...
...The trouble is that handsome is as handsome does in a movie...
...It is too subtle a point against him...
...In an effort to come out somewhere, Schroeder saves for the end of his film the one moment of real uneasiness in which he managed to catch Amin...
...The only trouble with it is that it gives us a somewhat false impression of this man who rose to power through a series of political assassinations and has since executed or tortured to death perhaps 100,000 of his countrymen...
...We know him for a rough character, for instance, by his habit of spitting on the gunmen he kills...
...Schroeder rankles at criticism that he allows Amin to be too charming...
...For Amin in Idi Amin Dada there are no external events...
...He is constantly being defined as a character by the opposition he meets, by the endless challenges to his reputation, his skills, or just his presence...
...Idi Amin Dada begins with Amin making a speech, and he talks non-stop from then until the end, when that doctor's question quietens him for a few seconds...
...Like the charm, the clownishness leads us away from any realization that the man is a mass murderer...
...But we also know him for the decent man he is underneath because that dog persists in tagging along with him despite the inundations of tobacco juice, and because Eastwood quietly suffers other defenseless people to accompany him as well...
...Doolittle...
...But in Eastwood's films this glance around the room comes from a man who has almost no assertion to make aside from it-a man who has usually been all but silent from the moment we met him...
...There are, in fact, three strikingly Fordian moments in The Outlaw Josey Wales, and in two of them-Eastwood's unwitting adoption of a squaw and an impromptu dance held outdoors-it is emotion rather than action that Eastwood has lifted from Ford...
Vol. 103 • October 1976 • No. 21
