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Trailer for "The Last King of Scotland"

It’s my job to report on what I have seen, not what I would like to have seen. Still, it’s awfully hard not to speculate about the film that The Last King of Scotland might have been in light of the potential that it squanders.

Going for it, the film has an undeniably compelling subject and an actor more than capable of portraying him. The subject is Idi Amin, whose command of the African nation of Uganda in the 1970s was as bizarre as it was horrifying. And the actor is Forest Whittaker, too often employed beneath his capabilities, here giving his all to a finely shaded performance of a man as charismatic as he was monstrous.

(That Whittaker will be nominated for and win an Academy Award is as close as you’ll get to a sure bet in this year’s Oscar race. He’s already been honored by most of the significant awards competitions, as well as by the Golden Globes.)

The Last King of Scotland is structured as the fictional story of a young Scottish doctor named Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy) who by an accident of faith becomes Amin’s personal physician and adviser. Although Amin did indeed have a Scottish physician (and an affinity for all things Scottish—he was known to wear a kilt in public), Garrigan is loosely based on an assortment of white advisers the dictator employed.

This would not be the first film to assume that white audiences need a surrogate in order to get to watch a story about African characters. But Garrigan turns out to be more than simply our entry into Amin’s story. Idi Amin, that most horrifying of 20th-century monsters (if even half the stories told about him are true), turns out to be a supporting character in a movie about the slow-in-coming political education of a callow, naïve young Westerner.

It’s the same condescending tactic used for Cry Freedom, where the life of anti-apartheid martyr Steven Biko became a secondary consideration to the ethical problems of a South African newspaperman. And if it was a poor strategy in Richard Attenborough’s film, it’s preposterous here. Garrigan is not only less interesting than Amin, he’s dull and poorly drawn by any standard.

The thrillseekers in the audience will yearn for more details of the atrocities that Amin is rumored to have committed, a list that by no means ends with cannibalizing his murdered enemies. The historically curious will search for details of the British colonial policies that randomly squeezed numerous incompatible tribes together into a single country. (Hmm, where else have we heard that?) Connoisseurs of acting will hunger for more of the overpowering physicality and cruel wit that Whitaker brings to Amin every time he’s onscreen.

But we are only frustrated as the film dwells on Garrigan, living the high life while ignoring Amin’s growing record of atrocities against his countrymen. Garrigan is obviously meant to represent the Western interests who are happy to turn a blind eye to “internal” conflicts so long as their own needs are met. But it’s an obvious point that isn’t worth squandering so much otherwise compelling history for. By the time the script unbelievably puts Garrigan in bed with one of Amin’s wives (Kerry Washington), we’ve so lost sympathy with him that we begin to look forward to his inevitable comeuppance.

What happens to him in the third act is horrifying enough (particularly because, as a fictional character, his fate isn’t predestined) to make you wonder if director Kevin MacDonald (the documentarian who made Touching the Void, not the former Kid in the Hall) has been pulling his punches up to that point. If so, it’s only one more strike against his film: There’s a moral problem in an artistic calculus that values the pain of one white doctor over the lives of at least 300,000 Africans who were murdered by Amin. See it for Whitaker’s performance, but then go out and rent Barbet Schroeder’s jaw-dropping 1974 documentary General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait for an idea of what this might have been.