"There have been tyrants, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall..."

Rating: 6/10 (5 February 2011)

Producer-director Richard Attenborough's biography of Mahatma Gandhi is a bit like the smile on leading actor Ben Kingsley's face: always at the ready, highly sympathetic, and just a touch self-satisfied. The film looms large (with a larger-than-life subject at its forefront), and yet it doesn't have an epic scope, just an epic-length (three hours and eight minutes). In the early 1900s, a bespectacled resident of India--not a cleric or, indeed, a member of public office--calmly accepts his role as the peaceful leader of a resistance movement of Hindus and Muslims against the hissable, heartless British who rule the country. The way John Briley's screenplay presents them, the British are nothing more than a wealthy, lazy monarch who take some kind of secret delight in arresting for Gandhi for no reason (except for being a threat to their regime)--and we in the audience are primed to applaud when Gandhi refuses to be taken for a passive mouthpiece for love and truth, standing firm under their omnipresent glare. Attenborough, who went on to win the Best Director Oscar, gives us the travails of Gandhi without much insight or humor, and the film is like a whitewashed course in a kind of carefully-crafted history (the filmmaker is so reverent of his subject, the thought of delving into Gandhi's less saintly moments would be anathema). Kingsley, himself an Oscar winner for Best Actor, has gone to admirable lengths to look and sound like Mahatma Gandhi, and his work is sterling; however, this vehicle surrounding the great martyr of India is so soaked in good will, good intentions, and good graces that it doesn't have much drive, either thematically or dramatically, particularly in its final hour. The winner of eight Oscars total, including Best Picture, "Gandhi" is really just a by-the-numbers (and therefore old-fashioned) heart-tugger...and that's for better or worse. **1/2 from ****