Essential history; good guys can win with good will and not guns

Rating: 9/10 (11 March 2003)

For all the macabre fascination with the unqualified bad guys of history that we have (how often do Hitler, Stalin, or even Mussolini appear as characters in movies), it's worth noting that the influence of Mohandas Gandhi has already outlasted that of any of the twentieth-century bad guys. Decolonization of Asia and Africa looks more permanent than the colonial empires.
Gandhi was the most important of those who whittled away at colonial power, and surprisingly the least military and despotic. The Indian subcontinent was not the first part of the colonial world to get full independence, but it was the most important region, and in view of the obvious power of the British Empire it seemed the least likely to get it. In view of the contrast between India and much of the rest of the post-colonial world, India has probably done best in politics because of Gandhi.
Gandhi appealed to the best in human nature, and if he didn't always succeed at bringing it out, he at least didn't make a mess of things with a personality cult or a lust for riches. An unlikely hero of a revolution, he had few tools for changing the world: ideas and ideals. Mandela, Havel, Walesa, and of course Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. owed much to him. Better Gandhi than Mao, Ho Chi Minh, or Fidel Castro.
The movie moves slowly, as it must; Gandhi was a contemplative man more than his fascistic antithesis, the so-called "Man of Action". Likewise, 'his' India is an undeniably gritty place -- which is all that it can be. This movie is a tribute to the elegance of thought of one of the most genuine, honest, and decent Great Men of History, and the elegance shows.