Solid, but a bit unevenly paced

Rating: 7/10 (27 May 2004)

Attenborough's `Gandhi' is a solid biopic about the slain human rights leader, and Kingsley's acting job is unbelievably good. There were times when I would be watching the film and would completely forget that this was an actor portraying the man, based on the few times I had seen film or photographs of the real man. The cinematography is exquisite on this film, and reminiscent of David Lean's work, and the music is excellent  so much so that after sitting through over three hours of film I kept the credits rolling to hear the score.
However, even allowing for the sheer amount of information that had to be put into one single film, I feel that there were some important things that were glossed over, and other scenes that certainly could have been better edited. Understandably, we first glimpse Gandhi as an attorney traveling to South Africa, where he first experiences the inequality that he chooses to spend the rest of his life fighting, but soon after, when he arrives in India, he is suddenly in the current dress of the poor. Until then, he had certainly sacrificed, but he had gone from insisting that he `always travels first class' to this manner of self-sacrifice after he is released from prison without any background. Perhaps surprise was Attenborough's intent, because that was my reaction. On the other hand, there was a lot of time spent on moments that could have been pared down a bit in order to produce a more even pace  for example, some of the many meetings amongst Gandhi's `co-leaders'. It was moments like these that made the film less compelling than I expected it to be  I am normally glued to my chair during just about any film, but I had no problem getting up for a moment or two because I suspected I wouldn't miss anything, which turned out to be a true assumption.
These criticisms are fairly minor in the grand scope of the film  I knew nothing of this period of history and I felt like I learned some incredible facts and was able to of course correlate these with other historical events. This was obviously a completely selfless man who died in an ironic manner after the sacrifices he and his family made in order to preach the virtues of non-violent protest. While I admit that I was a little under whelmed because I perhaps had grand preconceptions, Gandhi is definitely a solid and important film.
--Shelly