Gandhi (1982)

 

There aren't many titles I didn't see that would fit in the "epic movie" category, which were released in the sound era of the the cinema. It's not such a large set anyway. "Spartacus" might be an exception that I missed, although I might have seen it when I was too young to remember it. "Kundun" and "Gandhi" were two others. I always had my doubts about the first, which got more doubtful after "Silence" directed by the same Scorsese. For the second one, the three hours it spans made just too complicated to grant it the needed time. This week I finally decided to break it in pieces and remove it from my "to watch" list. 

I'll try to discuss "Gandhi" in brief, and mainly from the cinematic perspective. Any movie has a story and a story has a morale, but especially when the story is a real one the comments made on the morale slip to easily beyond the border of the social, political, etc, and often forget about evaluating the movie as a movie. And this is a movie blog and I'll try to keep it that way. Even though in this case is quite hard because "Gandhi" is mainly a movie with a political message. But it's late anyway, and I'm not really in the mood for writing :) ...

Obviously "Gandhi" is a biography of Mahatma Gandhi, starting with the end, returning to the activity towards gaining rights for the Hindu minority in South Africa, passing over to the period of peaceful fight for the Indian independence and finishing again with the end. Which was a senseless assassination of an old man already on the dusk of his life, coming as a bitter irony after a series of almost suicidal fasts, a main weapon Gandhi used during his life to solve various conflicts.

I didn't watch all movies directed by Richard Attenborough, but out of what I watched I think "Gandhi" shows the most powerful influence of David Lean. If you wouldn't know the director, you probably could align the movie with "The Bridge on the River Kwai" or with "Lawrence of Arabia". That's both good and bad. 

On the positive side we have the attention to the details, the importance given to the actors (practically "Gandhi" made Ben Kingsley a star), the way to build a key scene, and an almost documentary-like flow that doesn't seem to lose anything. On the negative side we have the "lengths". Even if you see the movie in three parts as I did, and you'll notice these less, they are present. As in Lean's case there are moments where it just drags. Also on the negative, the sound is fine, but definitely not the best part of the movie, but this is somehow specific to the pre '90s period when the sound was much more discreet than now. However, this is a contributing factor to an aging feeling about the movie, aging that's not so obvious in other titles of the '80s such as Bertolucci's "The Last Emperor" (true, that's 5 years younger than "Gandhi").

"Gandhi" is still a movie to watch, even only for your general knowledge or for the pacifist message which would summarize to something like "there's no good & evil, just two sides that should come together", but I said I won't delve into comments, although this seems still valid at a global level during current times, unfortunately a bit hard to grasp both for the "good" side, as well as for the "evil" side, whichever these might be.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5