Solid Biopic

Rating: 7/10 (12 October 2010)

GANDHI certainly did very well. It seems to have won almost every conceivable award. Ben Kingsley does a remarkable job of inhabiting such an inspiring historical character. You'll find you could return to the film on his performance alone.
The scenes in South Africa are particularly enthralling. GANDHI has a movie of different styles: documentary, luscious travelogue, and old style drama. The parts with the western media seem oddly reminiscent to the equivalent scenes in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA.
And yet, this isn't a perfect film. It feels incomplete somehow. Perhaps the divisiveness of the caste-system in bringing about unity could have been presented a bit more forcefully and the expense of the sectarian Hindu/Muslim divide.
Yet perhaps the biggest criticism must concern itself with the simple dramatic setbacks of the film. As Quentin Crisp - "though, very cleverly, the narrative begins with his assassination, we are not continuously drawn forward at an ever-increasing pace throughout the rest of the picture towards this climax. We do not know why he was killed, we were never made aware of what specific danger he was in nor from what quarter disaster would spring."