Gandhi's Glory

RICHARD ATTENBOROUGH'S GANDHI is probably as morally simple a work as one is likely to see in a movie theater today. In essence, it is a piece of allegory of the lesser kind. It relies on the viewer's allying himself with the moral forces and ideas represented by a single character instead of identifying and sympathizing with a character's complex attitudes, thoughts and feelings as a more realistic work would demand. Given this simplicity, Gandhi still succeeds and entertains--almost certainly as well as a movie of its kind could.

The subject obviously compels much of the film's allegorizing. Mohandas Gandhi was this century's most prominent saint. Saints, however, don't usually 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 turned him into a saint. The omission is a reasonable one, for to make a movie about this Gandhi might strain the medium or simply fail. Spiritual pilgramages are rarely short and allow little abbreviation for the sake of depiction. They are also difficult to see.

Consequently, the Gandhi we get is pure moral force. He exists without beginning or end, even if at the beginning of the film he wears a tie and his Hindu religiosity has not fully appeared, and at the end of it he is assassinated. His character has a marmoreal smoothness throughout; he lacks all the chinks in personality which would indicate to us his humanity and instead we have to find that in his paltry frame. In fact, the closest the movie approaches to any substantive character development comes early on, when in South Africa Gandhi pushes his wife around for balking at cleaning the latrines in his ashram. Gandhi quickly apologizes and the scene fades. From that point onward, Gandhi appears to take never a false step or, for that matter, ever to be in the wrong.

Because Gandhi lives in the movie as a force or principle rather than a person, he lives only in his opposition to those antithetical forces which confront him--the injustice, degradation and blunt evil of colonialism and racism. Since these afflict millions, first in South Africa, where Gandhi wages his nonviolent war against the racism of Jan Smuts's regime, and then in India, Gandhi and his battle necessarily take place on the national and international stage. And here the movie wins its audience even if it loses much of its humanity.

Gandhi is enjoyable largely because of its ability to evoke what P. R. men call the sweep of history. The excitement of masses of people in a huge flux-the same kind of excitement one finds in Reds or which David Lean Created in. say. Lawrence of Arabia or Doctor Zhivago is present in abundance and animates Gandhi. Long shots of a crowd standing with umbrellas in a heavy downpour chanting for Gandhi or of converging columns of people marching behind the Mahatma as he marches to the sea to defy the government drive in this impression convincingly.

The 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 who is squeezing everything out of his tenants. Gandhi, however, is a movie of surfaces, and these thorned ones are convincing. They make all the more stirring Gandhi's own triumphs over the viceroys and their empire--victories which are human and satisfying for the Indians and the audience and pleasantly humiliating for the British.

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 kids trying to figure it all out." When barking his story over the phone from a distant salt mine where hundreds of unarmed Indians are beaten in a peaceful protest he screams, "Whatever moral ascendency the West had she lost it today, Stop."

Much has been made of Ben Kingsley's acting as Gandhi, and he certainly deserves a great deal of praise for his portrayal of the sphinx-like reticence and overwhelming humility of the Mahatma. He also utters Gandhi's gospel-like sayings with enough gravity to mean something and enough reserve to keep them from sinking. Kingsley, however, is limited in what he can do with the role, for Gandhi's relationships with others are uniformly simple. His holiness, in effect, restricts him to a single dimension.

As a historical film, Gandhi provides a compelling recapitulation of the Indian movement for independence and Gandhi's extraordinary role in it. With its well-defined moral lines and its success in presenting an individual whose godliness makes him difficult to imagine, it is a winning movie well worth the four hours of sitting (though, it should be noted, not worth the lethal headache that the terrific technological advances of the Sack Charles Dolby stereo system will almost assuredly give you).

Yet, it is a movie that lacks much of the give and take between characters and the faulty human personalities which normally pull a person into a good film. Orwell, writing about Gandhi after he was murdered, noted. "The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human beings." These things, as Orwell saw, were not part of Gandhi's life nor are they part of the movie. For that reason, Gandhi seems more adoration than story.