Gandhi-- A Review

Although it is 188 minutes, like Lawrence of Arabia, Gandhi is worth watching again and again and again. I've always really, really liked this movie and since I snagged it at Target and sat down and watched it again earlier this week I've been trying to put my finger on exactly why I like it so much. Maybe it's because this is one of those rare movies where an actor can almost perfectly inhabit the role in question- which Ben Kingsley does. The guy becomes what you'd imagine Gandhi to be. It's hard to know for sure, since I never met Gandhi, but he certainly seems to fit the bill.

The amount of effort and detail put into this film is evident from the very first minute onwards. Something like 400,000 extras were used for the funeral scene at the start of the movie- (we see Gandhi's assassination, his funeral and then the movie flashes back to South Africa) and from there, Sir Richard Attenborough takes history by the horns and just goes, goes, goes. Wisely, he starts not at the very beginning of Gandhi's life, but at a key life changing event that begins Gandhi's activism- when he, as a young lawyer was thrown off of a train in South Africa, where Indians were treated as second class citizens. From there, we follow Gandhi back to India, where he eschews the upper crust, elites that permeate the Congress Party and instead tries to learn as much as he can about the ordinary people of India.

That was key: Gandhi, historically speaking proved to be critical in linking the very limited scope of the Congress Party to the people of India as a whole. He made the Independence Movement into a mass movement, which in turn gave it the momentum to shake off British rule algoether. From that key decision, the movie takes through all the high points (the Dandi Salt March, non-cooperation) and the low points (the massacre at Amritsar, imprisonment and the decision to split India in two) of the fight for freedom from the British.

This is a sprawling, epic film about a man who is one of the titans of the 20th Century and who won't be forgotten anytime soon. It more than lives up to its billing- but the question remains- as with all historical epics: just how accurate is it?

I get the sensation that the movie itself is fairly true to history. It doesn't come across as hagiographic by any stretch of the imagination, but at the same time- my recent viewing of Rang de Basanti raises an interesting point: how come for Westerners, Gandhi is essentially the beginning and the end of the Indian independence movement? I had never really heard of Subha Chandra Bose until recently- and hadn't heard of Bhagat Singh or Lala Lajpat Rai until the day before yesterday. The one truth that Gandhi overlooks is that the fight for Indian Independence had a cast of hundreds, if not thousands and there are other figures who carried their weight in the fight, yet they get eclipsed by Gandhi. The best explanation my TA could come up with in discussion today was: 'well, he wasn't violent.' And granted, Gandhi championed the idea of non-violent resistance that had an impact far beyond India, but the picture of the independence struggle is, in my book incomplete.

I want to spend some time remedying that, when I get a minute or two to breathe, think and read a little on the topic in question.

But overall: 4 stars and then some and this is a true epic that deserved every accolade it got and comes as close to doing the life of Gandhi justice as anyone possibly could.