If I had been forced to watch Gandhi in any sort of history class, as many people were in high school, I would have been bored out of my mind, not so much because this would have taken up an entire week of class time so I wouldn’t have had adequate time to appreciate the story before the bell rang, but because I would have had to divert my attention to some sort of worksheet so I could answer a bunch of questions about how one line or scene served as some joyous triumph that explains why 13 pages in some bullshit textbook exist. However, because I didn’t, I got enjoy this movie for what it really was, which was a masterful telling of the rise of the most stubborn man in the world.
Now, let’s make sure ya’ll don’t go taking that as an insult because I mean that as respectfully as I can because it’s Gandhi’s tactful stubbornness that made him become the icon that he was and enact the changes that he did, and by tactful I mean, as my dad would put it, “The ability to tell someone to eat shit in such a way that they come back asking for seconds.” Gandhi was a pain in the ass, but like iodine painful; the more it hurt, the more you knew it was working. Starting as a lawyer NOT raised in India, he was incapable of seeing how the reality of the Indian culture would fuck itself in the side once they had control and eventually create the India/Pakistan divide that’s just more depressing than inspirational, but the fact that he fought the law and HE won and practically single-handedly took on the British occupation of India and ran their ass out of town still makes him one of the craziest ol’ sons of a bitch to ever walk the Earth.
Gandhi is amazingly entertaining despite the fact it was practically begging to be analyzed like a high school history lesson. I was expecting a lot more focus on the teachings of Gandhi and how that shaped the country, but kindly enough, this film puts that on the backburner and focuses on his life and his day to day. In the introduction by director Richard Attenborough, he said that he hoped that movie was entertaining because if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be worth watching and holy fuck, do I respect him for that.
Only rarely losing focus, perhaps for good reason, Attenborough keeps Gandhi, played by Sir Ben Kingsley, a fun character to watch because of his quick wit, his borderline-smug demeanor, and well…just really fine fucking acting by one of the greats of our time. In an almost humorous way, we are taken on Gandhi’s journey from hearing to prison to meeting to prison to gathering to prison to prison to prison and all the while, through the gleeful smile of the Mahatma we aren’t once left saying “man, sucks to be him,” but instead thinking “ok, old man, you’re move. What you got?” Not to say this was a comedy, however, it is very easy to look at this film as a tragedy, as many flashback movies tend to be where the hero dies at the end and Gandhi isn’t that either, it is simply a biography that has a sound ending.
Though the pacing tended to be a bit off and I felt it missed some opportunities to really hit the point home of how much the British occupation needed to end and how unfair it actually was, that’s me reporting as someone who looks at the movie standards of today and tricks used to emphasize and underline, say, the mass murder of 1500 people using slow-motion and crafty audio editing techniques. Maybe I’m just a stubborn prick, but so was Gandhi so let’s just say he moved me.
This wasn’t one of those jawdropping experiences for me either which is usually how a film hits that prestigious 10/10 mark, but damn it was pretty fucking good anyway. I give Gandhi an amazing 9 dustbusters out of 10 and urge you to watch it, but, as Attenborough requests, please just enjoy it.
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