Gandhi is oversimplification of the very best, most high-minded sort, but still oversimplification. It is a large-scale historical biography of the opulent, oldfashioned kind of which David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia is the finest specimen, and, indeed, Lean strove long and hard to get a crack at Gandhi himself. What Richard Attenborough has wrought is, finally, almost as much a tribute to Lean as to Gandhi, though the Mahatma was a more complex, quirkier figure than Attenborough’s protagonist, and Lean’s version might well have been, with or without a screenplay by Robert Bolt, a mite more idiosyncratic and unpredictable. John Briley, to whom the final screenplay is credited (though other hands may have left their marks on it), has done a neat, perhaps too neat, job of pulling things together, and for most of its three and a half hours, with intermission, it works.
Attenborough has done justice to both the South African and the Indian backgrounds, and the grandiose set pieces such as Gandhi’s funeral work—well— spectacularly. Various scenes of brutality are carefully managed so as to convey the maximum of pain with the minimum of obvious gore, and, I suppose, that is to the good. The obvious problem with such a film is how to handle the politics without confusing or boring the average viewer, and without offending either India or Pakistan; formerly bloated but now shrunken Britain can be allowed to take its lumps all over again, and the Afrikaners are fair game for anyone. The slightly less obvious problem is how to avoid making Gandhi into a plaster saint.
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