Gandhi
(1982)
Gandhi’s opening
text references the importance of trying to find one’s way to the heart of the
man in recounting his life, and unfortunately, though unsurprisingly, you couldn’t
say Sir Dickie Attenborough succeeded in his enormous epic, duly crowned with
the Best Picture Oscar (and BAFTA) for being an enormous epic. It’s a largely
reverent, respectful, uninvolved film that mimics the tools of spectacle and
canvas from that master of the enormous epic David Lean (who had planned his
own version, with, naturally Alec Guinness in the title role; we saw how well
that went down in A Passage to India),
but entirely fails to inject the proceedings with his sense of narrative surety
and grasp of character.
Gandhi, Sir Dickie’s dream project, decades in the
attempted making, comes unstuck first and foremost with its screenplay.
Attenborough was a resolutely passionless director (that is, in terms of
translating his effusive temperament to the screen), but entirely competent at
putting a film together provided it had solid foundations; that’s why A Bridge Too Far stands up (William
Goldman’s split narrative complemented by canny star casting). At one point in
the film, Gandhi correct another’s statement; “I for one have never advocated passive anything”. Presumably he
would have taken issue with his biographer’s passive filmmaking, in that case. One
could hew positive; one the one hand, Gandhi
largely resists the urge to outright veneration when bearing witness to its
protagonist. But, on the other, it’s a plod.
Kingsley is
formidable, of course, but there is negligible insight into his character’s
foibles and emotion life (his celibacy is mentioned in respectful passing by
his wife; going unexamined was his predilection for sleeping in the buff with
similarly buff teenage girls, all the better to test his spiritual mettle – but then, what power- or popularity-crazed
figure doesn’t have a few sexual peccadillos, right?) Given the way Ghandi revolves exclusively around Mahatma,
at the expense of other main players, there’s precious little empathy for what
made him tick. Gandhi is an icon before you see the film, and he’s that same
icon after you’ve finished watching it. Which means, for all the shades
Kingsley attempts to imbue, there’s no real danger of getting under his
character’s skin.
At one
point, following an argument with his wife (Rohini Hattangadi), Gandhi
self-recriminates (“What’s the matter
with me?”) and she consoles “You’re
human, only human”. Which goes to the real Nehru’s advice to Sir Dickie not
to deify him. But that’s evidently easier said than done. Early in his life,
when travelling South Africa, Gandhi is outraged to be thrown off a train (“But I always go first class”),
admonished that “There are no coloured
attorneys in South Africa”.
It’s about the only point – the odd off-guard
witticism aside – where we feel a driven, motivated figure, the one who makes
dramatic capital from claiming injustices must be fought as “we are all children of God”. Quickly
after this, like a master architect of his own iconography, Gandhi has donned
the outfit and is espousing the platitudes and insights of a beatific saint,
the embodiment of the great soul, because that’s his popular identity.
We see his
shrewdness as a planner and motivator not just in his choice of clothing (to
symbolise that he lives like the poorest; it isn’t covered that his consequent relationship
with his own family was fractious, and that in living the example to others he
shunned giving his children love, because he magnanimously saw all the world’s
children as his) but also in his legalistic diligence. He does not call for a
strike, but rather a national day of prayer and fasting, and his personalised
Salt March is astute for the implications it holds regarding British rule
rather than what one man is doing (illustrated by John Gielgud’s Lord Irwin
backtracking decisively over letting him get on with it; “Thank him for his letter, and put him in jail”).
There are
of course, the famous words of wisdom (“An
eye for an aye only ends up making the whole world blind”), most powerfully
conveyed following the Partition of India. Fasting for an end to violence
between Hindus and Muslims, a man comes to Gandhi enraged over what he has been
brought to; he killed a Muslim child, in vengeance for his murdered son. With
Solomon-esque judgement, Gandhi advises that the way to make amends is to adopt
an orphan boy, but he must be a
Muslim, and must be raised as a Muslim. Unlike many of the instances in the
film, where Gandhi says something sage and we nod inwardly, this one actually
has raw impact and power, because it’s all over the face of the father.
Akhil Gupta’s contemporary essay on the politics of the film found problems with
pretty much everything Attenborough depicted. I was particularly struck by how,
in the last half hour, as the great achievement of Gandhi (Gupta stresses that
there was probably a balance of reasons for British withdrawal, rather than
simply the most-credited one) gives way to the political turmoil and civic
unrest that came with creating Pakistan, we had missed out on a vast swathe of
the story that should have been a part of this three-hour-plus Mahatma-fest.
Gupta takes
issue with Nehru being presented as a Gandhi-yes man, which may be valid,
although Roshan Seth’s performance is one of the few supporting roles that actually
seems vital and engaged (it’s perhaps rather instructive, but not in a good
way, that I ended up thinking “Oh, he was in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” in reaction to several of the
cast members). Jinnah (Alyque Padamsee) is simply a bad guy on the fringes,
referenced as fermenting discord between religions and so undermining all
Gandhi’s good work. These characters should have been fully integrated into the
narrative, particularly given that, as Gupta comments, this is a film about Gandhi
the political facilitator, not Gandhi the eccentric personality or Gandhi the
spiritual leader (while the latter aspect comes into it, it is essentially, as
noted, presented through cherry-on-top wordplay).
Often in
these sorts of period pieces, the cavalcade of supporting players makes for agreeable
diversion, but here it’s less the case as they’re all such “types”. There’s Ian
Charleson, fresh from British are coming Oscar glory in Chariots of Fire, Martin Sheen on the cause trail, doing his bit as
an American journalist, and Candice Bergen as another. They’re our western “ins”
to a different world, probably, in Dickie’s mind, but they didn’t really need
to be there at all (look at the far superior – but much less seen and
celebrated – Kundun for the use of technique itself to explore unfamiliar
beliefs, customs and territory).
The Imperial cast of Brit stage stalwarts, led
by Gielgud, can’t fail to impress, although few of them can claim anything to
get their teeth into (Edward Fox, as an unrepentant mass-slaughterer, is a
notable exception – the real General Dyer was thanked by the House of Lords for
his patriotic act – and Daniel Day Lewis also shows up for about two minutes as
a South African racist).
In many
respects, Gandhi is simply
symptomatic of the greater malaise suffered by the biopic, fenced in by
linearity and professed diligence. It’s even more the case here, though,
because Attenborough is such a resolutely unimaginative director (he even has
Ravi Shankar provide the score) and lacks any kind of incisiveness over his
title character’s legacy or willingness to interrogate his saintliness. As long
as that widescreen is chock full of spectacle, it’ll do. It’s much the same
with the awards such films foster; importance tends to equate with worth,
rather than actual quality.
Gandhi is decent, solid, respectable, but mostly
flaccid. I don’t think that’s because there’s some kind of preventative in
place, that a film about non-violent resistance is inherently antithetical to
good drama, which popularly thrives on conflict (although, I’m sure documenting
the leader’s erratic espousals on the subject of pacifism would have spiced
things up a bit). Rather, it’s that Attenborough never broke his story, how to
position this figure in the narrative so it didn’t simply become the
unbesmirchable, faintly anodyne portrait it is.
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