Word: gandhis
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...GANDHI Directed by Richard Attenborough; Screenplay by John Briley...
...singular virtue of Gandhi that its title figure is also a character in the usual dramatic sense of the term. As portrayed by Ben Kingsley, 37, an actor from the Royal Shakespeare Company making his film debut, Gandhi must age some 50 years. In the process he must convert himself from the vigorous, somewhat arrogant, somewhat dandyish young lawyer who first caught the world's attention with his nonviolent resistance to South Africa's racial laws, to the saintly martyr who finally captured the world's conscience as he willed a nation into being. It is impossible...
...course in playing Gandhi, an actor must be less concerned with physical verisimilitude than with spiritual presence, and here Kingsley is nothing short of astonishing. His Gandhi is no mystic, but a man with a practical political sense, an almost sly awareness of other men's motives and how they might be levered to advance his own cause, and, above all, a sense of self-irony. He seems always to be keeping a wary, testing eye on himself, conscious of his own failings, watchful that he not succumb to the vanity of power. Kingsley's performance suggests that...
...would be a pleasure to report that his directorial skill matched his producer's zeal, but Attenborough's style is traditional-stately. His imagery of the Indian landscape has a conventional handsomeness that is more predictable then enlivening. His staging of the many and brutal confrontations between Gandhi's followers and their official oppressors is competent and craftsmanlike, but the electricity that someone like David Lean can bring to work of this kind rarely crackles from the screen. Historical personages are played by stars (John Gielgud as Lord Irwin, Candice Bergen as Photographer Margaret Bourke-White...
...which matters less than one might think. Indeed, the refusal to be flashy finally seems to be an earnest of the obvious idealism that Attenborough brought to his work, and of his apparent desire to both demythologize and demystify his subject, thus restoring Gandhi to human dimension. The director's stylistic self-denial serves to keep one's attention fastened where it belongs: on a persuasive, if perhaps debatable vision of Gandhi's spirit, and on the remarkable actor who has caught its light in all its seasons...