Gandhi
This review is a part of the Best Picture Project: a review of every single Academy Award winner for the Best Picture category. Gandhi is the fifty fifth Best Picture winner at the 1982 Academy Awards.
Okay, I'm going to be burned at the stake for this, but I don't particularly care for Richard Attenborough's Gandhi. It moves far too glacially, is trying to battle too many narrative fights, and is simply a little too long (just over three hours). This review is going to be very short and sweet as a result. With that brief rant out of the way, there is one major reason to watch the biographical epic Gandhi, and it comes in the form of two words: Ben Kingsley. Without question, Kingsley's performance is one of the greatest you will ever see. The one good thing about the film covering so much of Mahatma Gandhi's life, is being able to see Ben Kingsley take on every single small detail. These include accent changes (when Gandhi loses his English drawl over time), physical deterioration, and the weathering of Gandhi emotionally (leading to his heightened spirituality).
Whenever the film drags on for too long, you will be saved by another scene-stealing moment by Kingsley; these come in the form of speeches, emotional reactions, and even the little things. Gandhi was much more complicated than you may assume, and Attenborough attempts to showcase this. It takes Kingsley's performance to push these examples further, to really drive the points home. His domestic life wasn't perfect, and his political resilience wasn't without its major detractions. Attenborough sought to show all of this; a commendable effort, despite how much it slows the narrative down. We have an outsider in the form of Martin Sheen as a journalist, which only adds more to the pace. Unlike a film like Lawrence of Arabia, which deals with a lot but feels limitless, Gandhi feels bogged down. The film should have either been this outlier perspective, or not featured that extra strand as a major plot device.
The entire film revolves around Ben Kingsley’s monumental performance.
Nonetheless, despite its slow, single-tone nature, there is some worth in Gandhi. As a performance podium, you're witnessing a once-brilliant actor at his very prime, as he not only embodies an iconic figure, but that figure's entire life. Otherwise, Gandhi means well with how much it's trying to cover. It makes for a solid single watch, but a subsequent viewing can maybe feel like a chore depending on the day. At least the film is beyond ambitious: undermining such a historical icon would have been a wasted effort altogether. Maybe Gandhi would have fared better as a television movie (which wasn't a foreign concept in the '80s, especially in Britain): an opportunity to add more flourishes to remove its single-tone nature, and the ability to divide the film into digestible chunks. Oh well. The trek is worth it for Ben Kingsley's pitch perfect performance alone.
Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Ryerson University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.