Word: attenborough
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...points he makes need to be commented upon. No one denies that the movie glosses over Gandhi's life, least of all the Indians, but his implication that the movie is simply a piece of political propaganda by the Indian Government is ludicrous as is the notion of Richard Attenborough being an Indian "agent" hired to defame Jinnah. The partial funding of the film by the government was a profitable financial investment and nothing else. The unfavorable portrayal of Jinnah is a consequence of the director's own views and not a result of political pressure by the Indian government...
...movie box-office grosses ($3.4 billion), but judging by the Academy Award nominations announced last week, it was a vintage year for pictures and performances as well. By and large, the nominated were both predictable and respectable. Three Best Picture nominees dominated the Academy's voting: Sir Richard Attenborough's epic Gandhi with eleven nominations; Tootsie, directed by Sydney Pollack, with ten; and Steven Spielberg's E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial with nine. (The other contenders for Best Picture: Sidney Lumet's The Verdict and Constantin Costa-Gavras' Missing...
GANDHI is technically a fine film. Attenborough's direction is solid, despite some lapses in John Briley's generally adequate script. Attenborough gets good performances out of his star-heavy cast, which includes John Gielgud, Martin Sheen, Trevor Howard, and Jan Charleson. But Candace Bergen as Katherine Bourke White is a beautifully leaden exception and the actors occasionally get stuck in tight spots. Sheen, for instance as a New York Times reporter who follows Gandhi both in South Africa and India and reminisces wistfully about his early meetings with the Mahatma, has to say, "We were a bit like college...
...make for good movies at all--unless of course you happen to have one of those rare ones who appear in the midst of powerful human events. Joan of Arc was such a figure, as was Gandhi, the leader of one of history's greatest popular movements. The Gandhi Attenborough chose to depict is the Gandhi of popular memory: the holy man who shrewdly arrayed his moral power against a corrupt colonial regime. Attenborough ignores the Gandhi who while a young man in England dabbled in the arts and pastimes of Western civilization and then underwent the spiritual transformation that...
...sense of largeness which permeates the film is enhanced by the plain good versus evil struggle. Attenborough achieves in the film a significant, if somewhat unsubtle, portrayal of the sins of colonialism--sins which may have slipped from contemporary consciousness with the political polarization and generally awful governance of the Third World over the last 20 years. (This too is the bitter legacy left by colonial powers.) There is an unwillingness to see beyond the grossness and malice of a mine owner who sends mounted troops out to beat protestors or the cupidity of a flaccid land owner...