But Whitaker can do only so much, and all of it is tangential to the plot structure, which allows mere glimpses of Amin, and those solely in relation to Nicholas's spiritual ordeal. We have no idea whether Amin's descent into paranoia is itself the result of a corrupting temptation (as, say, with Macbeth) and thus something we might possibly identify with, or a psychosis peculiar to modern warlords, like Stalin's, Hitler's, Pol Pot's, Kim Jong-il's, or Ahmadinejad's, and thus something that in the realm of fiction can only be observed.

The Last King of Scotland doesn't have the scope of Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall (2004), which shows Hitler in his bunker just before his fittingly ignoble end. The wonder of Downfall's use of Hitler is that in that cramped space, the familiar gestures as well as the voice and ideas — developed for frenetically rousing podium speeches and radio broadcasts — convey expressionistically what they always were: mad histrionics. Like The Last King of Scotland, Downfall keeps its lunatic capo dei capi on the periphery of the central romance of his secretary's detoxification from her ideological fervor. Overall, however, Hirschbiegel's movie is a panorama of factual details about the effect of that fervor on the German people themselves.

In The Last King of Scotland, by sad contrast, Ugandans matter only to the extent that Nicholas learns something from their untimely demise. (And the sizeable Asian population is mentioned only when Amin expels them from the country.) You discover almost nothing about Uganda and its people from the movie, which nevertheless suggests that Amin's reign was a major episode in modern African history. Consequently, the movie's emphasis on Nicholas's misadventures, as if the audience couldn't get into the story of Uganda without an educated, white, middle-class European as a protagonist, is a huge let-down in its own terms.

The Last King of Scotland thus becomes another globe-trotting redemptive romance fueled by white guilt for the lingering effects of colonialism, with all the emphasis on Westerners. Hotel Rwanda (2004) similarly missed the political texture of the local situation it depicted, focusing its disgust instead on the withdrawal of the UN troops, but at least it featured the spiritual redemption of a Rwandan.

At the same time, however, McAvoy — like the underappreciated Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada — carries the movie in the leading role. Nicholas's very openness to new situations is shaded by the self-satisfaction with which the counterculture-era left threw out elements of common morality, decency, and civility in its attempt to get rid of useless social conventions and prejudices. Like many a '60s lefty, Nicholas imagines that his adventurism is inherently progressive, and McAvoy gets the sneering superiority typical of his cohort just right. (Lucas Belvaux's superb political crime picture On the Run (2002) dramatizes this more pointedly. The bizarre-elegiac climax comes when the intractable protagonist Bruno warns the apostate Jeanne about the imaginary revolutionary guard behind him, while she looks on in dismay, knowing better in more ways than one.)