While attentive to key aspects in humanizing a character, it still makes the same mistake many biopics and epics do

Rating: 6/10 (21 January 2015)

Richard Attenborough's Gandhi is the perfect film to show someone if they want to see the true art of character actor and witness an actor lose himself in a role for over three hours. Ben Kingsley commands the screen as Mahatma Gandhi, almost never leaving the frame, and with that, creates an immersing film on the basis of a figure alone, who transitions epic and larger-than-life boundaries to become a man on a human level. The opening title card of the film states that it's impossible for a single film to show and develop all of one man's accomplishments on screen, as well as giving each time period and year their allotted weight and detail. However, this particular film's prime goal is to be spiritually accurate and faithful to the life of Gandhi by showing his active pluralism, reading and following Hindu, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish principles and being a loyal man of God through various different religions.
On that level, Gandhi succeeds overwhelmingly; at over three hours, the spiritual effects of the film are never desecrated, nor limited in their size or impact. Writer John Briley and Attenborough provide keen attention to detail in various spiritual aspects of the film, not only showing Gandhi as a loyal follower, but delicately handling each religion with its own respect and grace. On a human level, Gandhi succeeds for the most part because having the man in the frame for most of the film, through his journey of courageous, non-violent resistance and self-doubt, provide for a focus that is deeply rooted in realism and human emotions. Gandhi, however, doesn't overcome the hump of basically doing exactly what its title card said was impossible from the get-go; the film, at one-hundred and eighty-seven minutes long, tries to pack in far too much and, in turn, becomes a grating sit well into its two hours. We see important historical events that are either not fully developed or shortchanged so that the film can be inclusive to nearly every major event in Gandhi's life, and it is with the film's persistency to check off a laundry list of events that it obscures opportunities to further humanize its central figure.
The film follows Kingsley's Gandhi as a man who was motivated following being thrown from a train in South Africa for being in the traditionally all-white first class section to liberate the Indian people of the region. Gandhi preaches the gospel of non-violent resistance, which doesn't condone acts of brutality against oppressors, however, doesn't accept passivity either. Gandhi believes in resistance that shows that he and his brothers and sisters are fed up with harsh treatment, and rises above such acts of brutality by showing who really is the strongest.
Following Indian liberation in South Africa, Gandhi takes on a task that initially seems insurmountable; liberate the Indians of the oppressive British Empire, a challenge he accepts following his return home to India where he is recognized as a hero and a powerful figure. It is here when Gandhi decides to partake in a hunger strike, an action which is, essentially, being violent to oneself rather than a specific group of people. It is during is fight for India's independence that we, and Gandhi, for that matter, see just what he's made of and all he is capable of as a human being.
An event of Gandhi's life that would've been fit for a film itself would've been the hunger strike, which crippled Gandhi and made him a skinnier soul than he already was. Such an event, like Nelson Mandela's prison sentence of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Selma protest, are events that would've made for fine, epic films benefiting from a concentration in a specific event. Gandhi's is a film that occupies a grand amount of space and a large amount of time, even boasting an intermission, and with all this time and ground to cover, inevitably, even if you don't know the entire story, you know that certain situations were truncated or lack the kind of development needed to make them more meaningful. While Attenborough slows the film down to assert Gandhi's religious devotion and his human qualities, he nonetheless makes the classic mistake of epics and biopics in that he tries to cover too much ground that even the liberal runtime of three hours and eleven minutes cannot do effectively.
Starring: Ben Kinglsey, Rohini Hattangadi, and Roshan Seth. Directed by: Richard Attenborough.