This may be a huge, epic movie, but it is also intensely personal.
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"Nonviolence and truth are inseparable and presuppose one another. There is no god higher than truth." --Mahatma Gandhi
Indian spiritual and political leader Mohandas Karamchand "Mahatma" (the great soul) Gandhi´s life was extraordinary and heroic, so it´s no wonder that his 1982 movie biography would be monumental. How big? Well, for one thing it holds the record for the largest number of actors employed in a film, well over a quarter of a million extras in a single scene. THAT big. "Gandhi" is a huge, sprawling, old-fashioned epic in the tradition of films by David Lean and Cecil B. DeMille, yet it manages also to maintain an intimacy with its subject that helps us to understand Gandhi as a person as much as an icon. Columbia TriStar´s DVD package treats its material with the respect deserving of a film that won eight (or nine depending on how you´re counting) Academy Awards for Best Picture, Actor (Ben Kingsley), Director (Sir Richard Attenborough), Screenplay (John Briley), Art Direction and Set Decoration (Stuart Craig, Bob Laing, and Michael Seirton), Cinematography (Billy Williams and Ronnie Taylor), Costume Design (John Mollo and Bhanu Athaiya) and Film Editing (John Bloom).
The film´s success rests on three principal factors. The first is the historical matter itself. Gandhi was a towering little man, an inspirational figure who, amid the most turbulent, horror-filled years of war and bloodshed in history, taught the world an alternative, nonviolent method of fighting oppression. One could hardly expect anything less than a towering motion picture from such remarkable origins. The second factor is producer-director Richard Attenborough´s thorough attention to detail. He began researching the project some twenty years earlier, meticulously planning it for decades. He may have created a film that goes on a bit too long at over three hours, wanders somewhat astray in the second half, and tends to overly sanitize a man who was, after all, still human; but one can hardly doubt the sincere, exhilarating, uplifting spirit with which Attenborough imbues his film.
The third contributing factor is Ben Kingsley in the title role. Although most of us only know the historical Gandhi from old film clips and history books, Kingsley´s Gandhi seems to personify everything we think and visualize about the man. We can never be certain what such fine actors as Dirk Bogarde, Peter Finch, Anthony Hopkins, Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay, and Sir Alec Guinness, all of whom turned down the role, would have brought to the characterization; but we can revel in Kingsley´s masterful portrayal. His performance is low key, to be sure, but that would appear to be in the nature of the character, humble and contrite. The actor even looks and sounds like Gandhi, aging over a fifty-year period, if not quite so frail and emaciated as the real person by the end of his life. Kingsley´s being half Indian himself (his birth name was Krishna Bhanji) may have helped him to identify further with the part. He prepared for his role extensively by studying newsreel footage of Gandhi, reading books on and by the subject, dieting, losing weight, practicing Yoga, and learning to spin thread just as the character did. The film does not delve too far into Gandhi´s personal life, particularly with his wife and many female admirers, but we do see him as a man subject to the same fits of temper, anger, and depression as the rest of us. Kingsley´s portrayal is reverential, to be sure, but essentially honest.
"We must be the change we wish to see."
The movie is prefaced with Attenborough´s disclaimer: "No man´s life can be encompassed in one telling...." True, but it doesn´t stop the director from trying. The story begins with Gandhi´s assassination in 1948 and then flashes back to 1893, when Gandhi was a young attorney thrown off a train in South Africa for being "colored." This is our first glimpse of Gandhi´s reaction to injustice. It may appear naive today, given the hindsight we enjoy, but Gandhi can´t understand how his fellow British subjects could treat one another so miserably because of race. It starts for him a lifelong crusade against racial and religious inequities. A Hindu by faith, Gandhi read widely the beliefs of other religious and ethnic groups--Christians, Jews, Moslems--as well as the writings of Henry David Thoreau. From these various teachings he devised his own philosophy of nonviolent civil disobedience, or peaceful resistance. He gives his followers a new way to fight, by not fighting. It was an extraordinary concept at a time when men like Hitler and Stalin were murdering millions.
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