Gandhi

BROWNED OUT ROADSHOW

Richard Attenborough’s twenty years-in-the-making Gandhi isn’t an altogether good movie—it’s lacking factual clarity, for starters—but its modus operandi is just about the real thing: Ben Kingsley as Mohandas K. We watch this wafer-thin bronzy elf and come to believe in the magic he wields against a very traditional piece of lumberous epic movie-making; he’s the biggest little exhibition of the 80s. With Billy Williams’ camera smoothly casting a brown-out around him (and around most everything else—were there power shortages on the sets?), Kingsley wastes no time in getting right to Gandhi’s worshipped saintliness, the soft touch ingratiation, the “aren’t I the clever one?” passiveness. We’re in smiling awe of Gandhi’s hissing at his enemies, the bastard British and their coldblooded violence: “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” and “I want to change their minds, not kill them for the weaknesses we all possess.” (Max Von Sydow in The Greatest Story Ever Told comes to mind and it’s hardly a coincidence: one British soldier excitedly says of Gandhi’s impending arrival, “He is coming!”) Noticeably missing in the movie is any hint of a Hitchenseque vitriol of Gandhi as a posturing mendicant—Hitch would accuse Mother Teresa of the same—and noticeably abridged is the theatrical psychology of Gandhi’s sex life. As is Hindu custom, Gandhi married at the age of 13 and was immediately taken with sex. At 16, while having intercourse with his wife, his father died. He felt deep guilt over this; while it didn’t prevent him from continuing to have sex, at the age of 37, after fathering five children (one of whom died in infancy), he took an abrupt vow of celibacy. Though abstinence is not uncommon among Hindu sects—reverence for and retention of sperm is considered strength for the body and mind—Gandhi’s struggle to remain chaste was reportedly endless, and he tested himself by “sleeping” with naked girls, to “keep warm.” The movie makes his sex commentary a funny yet not very insightful. Especially regarding this: Gandhi thought celibacy would lead to purer political activism, and he became a vegetarian and believed periodic fasts would further purify his political decisions and bring about peace. They didn’t—violence between factions erupted anyway, often because his followers as well as his detractors thought his fasts meaningless and insulting. (And he paid another price for not eating—he was plagued by constant constipation.) Though Gandhi’s life was a roadshow, when the last of the movie’s three hours begins the trip gets sloggy and confusing. We’re left to sort out for ourselves the complex political machinations of Gandhi, Nehru, the Hindus, the Muslims, the partitioning of India into autonomous states, as we sure as hell don’t get much help from Attenborough. He had the assistance at hand and chose not to utilize it: Lord Louis Mountbatten’s role in the history of India’s independence. Mountbatten, for whom the movie is partly dedicated, had been sent to India as its last viceroy to set in motion Britain’s abrogation of authority over and withdrawal from India. We’re given a few snippets of a stuffy Dickie as ass—okay, he was pompous; amongst the Rajperialist elite who was not?—but, inspite of rumors about his and his wife’s extramartial affairs, he had deep integrity to duty. Admired in England mostly by traditionalists, he was well respected, liked—even emulated—by Indians, including Nehru and Gandhi. With all the perplexing political action and the horror of slaughter when India divided itself, he needed to be the audience’s decoder.* (Deplorable yet somehow equal to Gandhi’s manifest destiny, Mountbatten would also become a nation’s tragic sacrifice to warring politics—having been killed by an IRA terrorist bomb in 1979.) We’re also led to accept the inference Gandhi’s assassin Natharum Godse, who was specifically trained for his task, was a fanatic extremist without much cause, when, in actuality, many Hindus, including Nehru, were exhausted by Gandhi’s contrarious solutions, with crowds shouting he was a “backdoor Muslim.” (Despite formal education, he opposed the remedy of industrialization.) With Candice Bergen, Edward Fox, John Gielgud, Trevor Howard, John Mills, Martin Sheen, Geraldine James, Michael Horden, Ian Bannen, Daniel Day-Lewis, John Ratzenberger (dubbed by Sheen?), Om Puri, Saeed Jeffrey, Roshan Seth, Rohini Hattangadi as Gandhi’s wife but sounding like Haya Harareet, and an estimated 300,000 extras for the funeral. Running at 188 minutes, the movie was given a “special engagement” classification. In Panavision.

Oscars for best picture, actor, director, original screenplay (John Briley), cinematography (Billy Williams, Ronnie Taylor), art direction, sound, film editing and costume design (!). British Academy awards: best film, actor, director. DGA winner. N.Y. Film Critics Circle: best film, actor.

* Presented by Masterpiece Theatre in 1986, ITV’s Lord Mountbatten: The Last Viceroy is a six part miniseries starring Nicol Williamson as Dickie and Janet Suzman as his wife. Available on DVD and at VODs. In 2017, the British-Indian co-production Viceroy’s House, with Huge Bonneville as Mountbatten, now available on Netflix. And of course Netflix’s The Crown, giving the fastidious Mountbatten, portrayed by Greg Wise and then Charles Dance, some very entertaining slaps here and there.

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ralphbenner@nowreviewing.com