marley (d kevin macdonald)

The Ubiquitous Troubadour

Is there any music which has become more ubiquitous around the world than Marley's? You could make an argument for Lennon. But Marley manages to cross boundaries, infiltrate himself into cultures like no-one else. With Marley, there's the added rider that it's not only the man but also the style of music. For the vast, vast majority, reggae and Marley are one and the same. Somehow, an impoverished child from Jamaica managed to conquer the world and he did it in a style which was all his own. All this was achieved by the age of 37, at which point he departed, Christ-like, his music posthumously furthering his global domination. In his review in the Guardian, Bradshaw said that the documentary portrayed him as a Napoleonic figure. Perhaps a truer comparison is with Alexander the Great.

Macdonald's lengthy doc pays its dues to the Marley story and the Marley myth. It's a measured piece of filmmaking which is prepared to note the more controversial aspects of his life and career. Including the way the star ruthlessly split with his teenage companions, Peter Tosh and the incredibly charismatic Bunny Wailer. It mentions the contradictions in his attitude to marriage and fidelity, including some telling footage of his wife on a tour bus. However, whilst it touches on these and other issues, it never probes, instead retaining a respectful distance. 

Even if Macdonald seems slightly bolder than Kapadia was prepared to be in his hagiographic Senna, the truth is we don't really get to know the man, leaving the viewer with the feeling that perhaps Marley himself was less interesting than his myth. He loved football and working out and women. Only his ambition truly marked him apart. It almost feels as though his capacity to retain his ordinariness, or perhaps his simplicity,  was the secret of his success. HIs lyrics in particular, heavily influenced by the bible, have a neutrality that allows anyone to engage with them, even if they don't speak English. The film closes with a sequence showing people round the world singing along to his music. In death, he has become a one man, one music UN peace mission. 

The film pays due tribute to this music, which remains almost uncannily powerful. At one point, a member of his band, explaining how they "invented" reggae, talks about the ghostly fourth beat which is never played. Suggesting that the power of reggae and Marley lies in the sound which is not heard, as much as the sounds we do hear. Likewise, Marley's power resides in the things (or roots) this film, for all its skill, never manages to track down. We await a Rosebud moment, a glimpse of the thing that really made him tick, but Marley takes his secrets with him, unwilling or unable to reveal what it was that turned him into the mythic figure whose influence and range, like all the best mythic figures, continues to expand long after the flesh lies dormant. 

love & information (w. caryl churchill, d. james macdonald)

Someone said: this is a play for the twitter generation.
The strangest thing was that this was not an insult.
It is. It is not.
Short works.
Short sharp shocks.
Precision. So that. Each word. Has its own weight.
Mathematics. Love. Sex. Death. Colour. Memory.
A box of treats.
Or perhaps.
A load of off-cuts.
Trimmed and pared and turned into a pot au feu. Or a guiso. Or a box of treats.
Borges. Pinter. Bishop Berkeley. And all the ones you've missed.
Ignorance is not bliss.
Where is the story arc?
Where is the character journey?
Thankfully, jettisoned. Or never even contemplated.
Unnecessary.
The pleasure of the text.
A bricolage.
A proper mash-up.
All the world contained. And all the other worlds too.
In which the play is also occurring.
And has been since before it was written.
Gracias. Merci. Arigato. etc
All mean the same thing.
We should be.
For small mercies.
And this is such a one.

the last king of scotland (dir. macdonald; w. morgan)

The first time the young Scottish doctor meets the dictator is a moment of high drama. The dictator, whose speech the feckless Scot has admired already, has an accident – his car has hit a cow, and he’s suffered a minor injury. The doctor is summoned, the cow lies wailing in misery on the side of the road. The doctor tends to the president whilst the cow wails. His humanitarian instincts working in overdrive, the doctor seizes the President’s pistol, lying on the car bonnet, and puts the cow out of its misery. The sudden action leads the soldiers to prime their rifles. The dictator looks like he might order anything. The doctor realises he’s out of his depth. The dictator learns he’s Scottish and embraces him. The woman the doctor fancies admires his reckless heroism.

It’s a beautifully structured and executed scene which sets a standard that The Last King of Scotland can never top. Unfortunately it comes at the end of the ‘first act’: the moment when Idi meets Doctor Garrigan.

Forest Whitaker proceeds to deliver a bravura performance as the mercurial Amin. However a trope has been set: he will swing from overbearing to jocular in the space of a moment. His very unpredictability becomes predictable. The Scottish doctor, played by James McAvoy, is a harder part to pull off. Here is a man who is complicit in the mechanisms of a dictatorship. His ignorance is hardly excused by his callowness. Yet at the same time he is also the romantic lead, a dashing model of globalised youth. The contradictions within the character are pertinent. McAvoy’s performance has flashes where it captures these contradictions, yet the film is reluctant to undercut its hero with too severe an examination, and his eventual sadistic torture operates as a kind of atonement. His Scottish charm lets him off the hook, and those who he could turn to for advice or support are caricatures, none more so than McBurney’s villainous-seeming Englishman, whose two-dimensional role in the film seems to be entirely to act as a foil for McAvoy’s boyish charm.

The Last King of Scotland has all the ingredients of an exhilarating film. One of the most ruthless rites of passage narratives you could ever come across. Charismatic characters, moral contradiction, sex, exoticism, violence and ‘based on a true story’. For all this, it remains something of a haggis of a movie; flavoursome but stodgy, spicy but safe. Nowhere is this more evident than in the climactic party scene, where Garrigan sleeps with Amin’s wife. The action is ‘heightened’ by a montage scene of topless African nubiles, dreamlike images of Amin entering the doctor’s consciousness, burning flames. Perhaps this is a wilful homage to seventies Bond movies, but if so, one wonders, why?

At the end of the movie, Amin berates Garrigan for playing the white tourist in exotic Africa. It’s a valid point which has been waiting to be made. There does seem a danger that a Western film set in Africa will echo this voyeurism. The Last King of Scotland tries to steer clear of the worst excesses of Amin’s rule, but it is still trading on the notion of the dark continent, where unspeakable things will inevitably happen, to be re-presented for Western consumption and entertainment. At the end of the movie the chastened Garrigan flies out on a plane; we go with him, little the wiser about the continent we’ve been invited to visit in his company for an hour or so.