Gandhi (1982)

Gandhi was the somewhat controversial winner of the Oscar for Best Picture of 1982. It beat out the public favorite, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and has been often cited as an example of how the Academy gets it wrong sometimes. I agree with the public that E.T. would have been a better choice for Best Picture, but watching Gandhi again here, I do think that second place or first alternate or runner-up is certainly appropriate. This is one of the best film biographies ever made, and once you allow yourself to adjust to its pacing, it's also one of the most powerful films in terms of its political agenda.

The story is, of course, the life of Mohandas Gandhi, a lawyer who devoted much of his life to ridding his country of British rule. The film begins and ends with Gandhi's assassination, so the rest of the film is a flashback to a sequence of major events that formed his political consciousness. That portion of the movie begins in South Africa, where Gandhi attempts to secure the rights of Indian nationals who were brought or came to Africa to work. He faces resistance there, just as he would time and time again in his home country. Through a series of episodes, we see how Gandhi and other leaders of various segments of the Indian population tried to hammer away at the British and their attempts to silence opposition.

I admired the performance of Ben Kingsley in the title role immensely. He does capture a sense of the patience and generosity of spirit that Gandhi had, yet he also allows us to see some of the leader's blind spots, particularly the way that his ego could sometimes interfere with the good work that he was doing. Kingsley gets some of the greatest dialogue, of course, because he gets to speak Gandhi's own words here.

The cast is enormous. Thousands of people are used in various scenes here, particularly for the large public demonstrations that often accompanied Gandhi's speeches. You have to admire director Richard Attenborough's gift for working with such crowds. And it seems that almost every actor working in the movies makes a cameo appearance here, from some great British actors like John Gielgud and John Mills to Americans like Martin Sheen and even Candice Bergen as Margaret Bourke-White. The real standouts, though, are the actors who portray the other Indian resistance leaders: Saeed Jeffrey, Alyque Padamsee, and Roshan Seth (my favorite) as Nehru. There are others, of course, but those three provide able support to Kingsley's performance. They represent different political perspectives in their characters, and each of these men is complex and fascinating and "real."

I know that E.T. is more of a crowd pleaser and that Gandhi takes much more patience. You're also going to learn a bit more about civil disobedience that you may remember from your history and social studies and political science classes. Still, this is a great movie, much better than you remember if you've seen it before, and worthy of the critical attention that it received. Even I grumbled about its multiple wins that year, but having had the chance to watch it a couple of times in the intervening twenty-six years, I have come to appreciate just how great a movie it really is. Give it another chance.