Evan D. As a project this year we are taking a trip through time to revisit all of the Best Picture winners in history, Wings to Anora. Gandhi is the fifty-fifth film in that series, to see all the other Best Picture reviews, click here. History has a way of sanitizing its great heroes. People who left this Earth better than they found it tend to be honored in their death far more than they ever were in life. Martin Luther King Jr. was a monumental figure in the Civil Rights movement, he was also despised by wide swaths of the American public during his time. Mohandas Gandhi, instrumental in India’s fight for independence, held more depth than the pacifist crusader we remember today. Richard Attenborough’s biographical epic Gandhi paints a multifaceted portrait of the Indian icon and the broader independence movement he helped spearhead.
A young, British trained lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi (Ben Kingsley) travels to South Africa by train. Despite his western education and status, he is confronted and expelled from the train for being Indian and daring to ride in the cabin reserved for whites. This opening sequence is actually a bit of fiction invented for the film. The real Gandhi was allowed to remain in first-class but it does the narratively important work of showing the deep structural racism of the worlds in which Gandhi would be fighting back. He departs the station and embarks on a quest to win rights for the large population of Indian workers in South Africa, previewing many of the same techniques that would define his later, more famous exploits. After a finding some relief for his fellow Indians in Africa, Gandhi returns to his homeland and finds himself immediately drafted by the leaders of an independence movement. Practically a foreigner in his own native land, the lawyer turned freedom fighter travels the country by train, meeting Indians of all religions and castes. Armed with the knowledge gained from this tour and the tactics learned in South Africa, Gandhi builds a multi-faith coalition to fight for home rule of India. History holds up this almost saintly vision of Gandhi. A stoic and unbending pacifist, unbothered by the violence brought upon him. Attenborough takes care to create a Gandhi shaped by the world around him and far deeper than a surface level portrait. Ben Kingsley brings him to life. In this Gandhi, you see the man that helped inspire MLK Jr. and the other future civil rights leaders. A man willing to compromise to gain ground for his people, one who used nonviolence specifically as a tool to draw out violence from his oppressors. A passion project of Attenborough’s for years, Gandhi is handsomely made, if not stunningly. The scenery of the Indian countryside is captured well and he manages to make a behemoth sized biopic feel well paced. His film particularly captures well the tides of the revolution brewing at its center. The brutality of the colonial British is as much present and impactful as any other character in the story. Some of the most impactful scenes depict the absolute horrors inflicted on Indian revolutionaries and build context for their resolve. Kingsley too is a major highlight. Playing Gandhi across decades he gives the character exactly what the film needs at every moment. Portraying someone so widely known and imagined in public consciousness can be difficult and Kingsley’s title character never falls back on that familiarity. Where biopics sometimes lean into imitation, Gandhi is revelatory about its subject, in no small part because of the lead actor. Gandhi is a tremendously long film and makes a habit of losing its background characters behind its titular one. Still, it is one of the most riveting biopics put to screen and the unique biographical film that manages to widen the scope and feel greater than just the one life on which it is focused. What it does say about the man at it’s center is far more human than hagiographic films like this one tend to be. 9/10
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