Gandhi

1982's GANDHI is the sort of film the Academy loved, and unsurprisingly awarded it Best Picture.  But I would not call it "Oscar bait" (as it's known in the modern vernacular).  Screenwriter John Briley and director Richard Attenborough are sensitive enough to memory of the beloved Mahatma Gandhi, leader of nonviolent resistance against the British in his homeland of India, to not make their movie a pandering bid for importance or notoriety.   Didactic, maybe.  Gandhi's life was characterized by demonstrations, jailings, fasts, repeat.   Somehow the movie, by any definition an "epic", reminiscent of classic Hollywood even, feels like the small human drama bio the Mahatma would've approved of. 

The film opens with Gandhi's assassination in 1948 by a Hindu nationalist whose name we do not learn, but a cursory Internet search can remedy that.  A massive funeral follows.  Then we are on a train fifty five years earlier when Mohandas K. Gandhi was a young lawyer in South Africa.   He is thrown off as Indians are not permitted in first class.  This will lead to the beginnings of an activist spirit and numerous confrontations.  Despite the beatings he receives from the police, Gandhi always turns the other cheek.  He is as well versed in Christianity as he is Hinduism.  Eventually, Indians will be granted the same rights as other British citizens.

Years later (the film jumps ahead in time an unspecified number of years more than once), Gandhi will have returned to India to become a scantily clad savior.   He will seek independence for his home country from the British Empire, always seeking peaceful yet forceful resistance.  The Brits do not always respond in kind, most gruesomely exemplified by the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, in which nearly four hundred civilians (including children) were fired upon by the British Indian Army.  This sequence is chillingly mounted by Attenborough.

GANDHI will follow the saintly, soft spoken hero in his steadfastness, his work not over even after India wins its independence after WW2.  In fact, religious tensions grow ever stronger.

Ben Kinsgley, who is half Indian, is nothing short of astounding in the title role.  His careful study of the subject paid off in a sterling performance of whispers and convincingly challenged gait.  The actor accordingly lost considerable weight for the later scenes, when Gandhi when on a hunger strike to protest fighting between Hindus and Muslims.  He literally transforms into the Mahatma.  No "look at me" theatrics here.

And Attenborough's film likewise cannot be charged with grandeur.  It's a big, ambitious production, but patient and thoughtful.  Slow? Yes.  Maybe even a bit dry and dull.  The three plus hour runtime really does feel that way at times, but as the opening onscreen words tells us, no movie of any length can give sufficient weight to a man's life or all those in it.  This would also include an American journalist played by Martin Sheen and photographer Margaret Bourke-White, portrayed unimpressively by Candace Bergen, who inexplicably gets second billing.  Her largest contribution is given as she watches Gandhi walk away one last time - "There's a certain sadness about him..."