I generally try to open every review with an anecdote, but what do I open up with for Gandhi? It’s from director Richard Attenborough, a man I know better as a character actor, and stars Ben Kinglsey in his film in what is basically his film debut. The movie looks to be an attempt by Attenborough to do his own version of Lawrence of Arabia. It even has an at-the-time unknown actor in the lead role with a three hour runtime. About all I have is to say that the movie for a time held the world record for “most extras.” It may still. I don’t know.
Though why Candace Bergen got second billing as Life photographer Margaret Bourke-White, I don’t know. She only pops up for the first time about two hours in, and she’s only in something like two scenes…
The film opens with Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination before flashing back to his youth as a lawyer in South Africa. He’s already developing a reputation as something of a do-gooder, working to ensure that the Indians living and working in South Africa are treated fairly as a citizen of the British Empire deserves under the law. He’s not pushing for anything more than that, and he believes he should be living as a man of his caste and station and religion demands, a move that prompts him to try and push his wife aside, but Kasturba Gandhi (Rohini Hattangadi) isn’t someone to be put off so easily. She ends up becoming a lifelong partner to her husband, and it was a role I really appreciated in many ways.
As it is, Gandhi’s career takes him back to India where he works with others to get India out from under British control. He’s an idealist, someone who has his beliefs in nonviolence as the path to independence, and his force of personality gets other people to go along with him, to the point where every day Indian citizens were lining up to be beaten by police in protest, and the police were mostly other Indians, a point that was not lost on me. Gandhi perhaps wins independence mostly through patience and being as frustrating as possible to his political opponents, pointing out that he wants India to be free from Britain without animosity, that he wants India to be home to both Hindus and Muslims, and that he doesn’t want to go to war with Pakistan when it becomes clear that there will be two countries there instead of one. And along the way, he spends most of his time weaving his own cloth even as many of his allies are living in more luxurious homes.
I don’t know much about the real Gandhi, so pretty much everything here was new to me. I knew he was assassinated and he engaged in hunger strikes and didn’t believe in violence. That was it. Now, I do know a movie like this is just a dramatization, that portions were made up or altered for dramatic effect, but seeing how Gandhi could take something as small as making a handful of salt out of seawater and turn it into a political statement that led to a lot of English frustration was rather interesting. Gandhi may have been a spiritual man, but he understood how politics worked at the same time. It made his smallest efforts all the more impressive as one man doing something is nothing, but thousands upon thousands following suit can be a revolution.
If there was something I didn’t care for, it was how much the movie focused on white allies. Sure, it helped Gandhi get what he needed done, but why not focus more on Gandhi himself and not the various white people who showed up to sing his praises? I suppose I may be asking too much for a movie from 1982, but it’s also something I don’t think would get as much attention today. Stodgy old Brits acting as antagonists? Sure. But did we need to see side scenes of the pro-Gandhi white folks singing his praises? Those actions should be self-evident, I would think. Otherwise, this was a great biopic.
Grade: B+
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