Not only does he have an uncanny resemblance to Gandhi (his father is from the same Indian state as Gandhi), but he plays the man with the exact demeanor you'd expect of someone who challenged the British Empire by fasting and making salt. The vast majority of the credit here goes to Kingsley. Gandhi is certainly a flawed film-the middle part, with the aforementioned cycle of violence, arrest, fast, negotiate, is mind-numbing in its repetitiveness-but, at the end, you know and love Bapu. He spends much of his days meditatively spinning modest cotton clothes on a simple loom, but still collects followers from all walks of life with his simple yet powerful message of human dignity, nonviolence, and self-determination. In the end, India and Pakistan become independent states and Gandhi a national, and then a worldwide, treasure. Nevertheless, the film grinds its way through 50 years of arrests and fasts meetings with Hindu and Muslim Indian leaders horrible acts of violence committed on all sides inventive methods of civil disobedience, including the Salt March and the burning of English-made garments negotiations with British officials and lots of gentle, yet cutting and inarguable preaching from Gandhi against British rule, and, later, religious intolerance. What can be done is to be faithful in spirit to the record and try to find one's way to the heart of the man. There is no way to give each year its allotted weight, to include each event, each person who helped to shape a lifetime. As the opening title card indicates, this is an admittedly flawed approach: No man's life can be encompassed in one telling. And for many, Ben Kingsley's performance in the title role, which won him an Oscar and worldwide fame, is the definitive portrayal of the man.Ĭlocking in at over three hours, Attenborough traces Gandhi's entire journey as one of the central figures of the Indian independence movement, from his beginnings as a civil rights lawyer (neatly dressed in a suit) in 1890s South Africa to his assassination in 1948. It is a textbook on Gandhi's political philosophy and the Indian quest for statehood. It is, of course, impossible to say that this apparent change in stature over the past few decades was all due to British director Richard Attenborough's Academy Award-winning biopic, but few films are treated as reverently as this one. Known by many as simply "Bapu" (Hindi for "father"), he is seen as more a symbol or an ideal than an actual human being with faults. and Nelson Mandela, Mohandas Gandhi is one of the giants of last century's human rights struggle. Today, the name "Gandhi" is synonymous with nonviolence, civil disobedience, and Indian statehood.
In his review of Gandhi when it was released in 1982, Roger Ebert wrote, "I imagine that for many Americans, Mahatma Gandhi remains a dimly understood historical figure." Reading that line 33 years later, it is hard to believe that this was ever the case.
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