| Columbia Pictures | Release Date: February 25, 1983 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
12
Mixed:
4
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
What is important about this film is not that it serves as a history lesson (although it does) but that, at a time when the threat of nuclear holocaust hangs ominously in the air, it reminds us that we are, after all, human, and thus capable of the most extraordinary and wonderful achievements, simply through the use of our imagination, our will, and our sense of right.
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Yes, Gandhi is a hagiography and not a nuanced, darkly shaded, or even very convincing portrait of an ambitious and deeply strange man. And as an account of the muddled, messy origins of Indian independence, the film is guilty of historical malpractice. But taken as a black-and-white morality play, Gandhi is unmatched. Simplifications and all, this is the movie my parents wanted me to see as a child—and it's the movie I'd want my own (purely theoretical) children to see as well.
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Neither Mr. Attenborough nor John Briley, who wrote the screenplay, are particularly adventurous filmmakers. Yet in some ways their almost obsessively middle-brow approach—their fondness for the gestures of conventional biographical cinema—seems self-effacing in a fashion suitable to the subject. Since Roberto Rossellini is not around to examine Gandhi in a film that would itself reflect the rigorous self-denial of the man, this very ordinary style is probably best.
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Attenborough's work lacks even the undercurrent of personality that David Lean brought to his films: the film has no flavor but that of the standard Hollywood hagiography, in which the hero is rhetorically elevated to sainthood by systematically stripping him of all his psychology and inner life. Luckily, Ben Kingsley is charismatic enough in the title role to command some warmth and interest, and the film is paced so quickly—rushing through 55 years of hastily exposited history—that it's never really boring.
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This is a monument that should be visited, but it is a monument of importance only as a reminder of the thing it seeks to memorialize. Gandhi may not be a hagiographic embarrassment to its subject, but it's a waxworks movie, a victory for British reserve. [08 Dec 1982]
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