A week or two ago, I watched "Gandhi" on TCM. I had seen it before, but not for a while. While the movie was certainly very interesting and dramatically compelling, I didn't like it as much as when I saw it before. Part of the reason is that since viewing it the last time, I've done more reading about the real Gandhi. While I have a lot of respect for Gandhi, I feel the movie presented a rather one-dimensional view of him. It seems to insist on making him basically a saint. None of Gandhi's quirks and eccentricities are shown in the movie (for example, that he often slept naked near naked teenage girls in order to prove his capacity to resist sexual temptation).

Additionally, the movie omits all of Gandhi's ideas that would be very controversial at best--for instance, in 1940, when Britain was preparing itself for an attempted invasion by Nazi Germany, he said that the British should lay down their arms and let the Nazis occupy them. He also said that even if the Nazis decided to kill the British en masse, the British should not resist and let themselves be killed. After the war, he said that the Jews "...should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs..." because doing so would supposedly have "aroused" world and German public opinion. I felt that the movie did the real Gandhi an injustice by not letting him be more human, multi-dimensional and complex. Great people are even more impressive when they're shown to be flawed humans like the rest of us.

I also thought that "Gandhi," even though over 3 hours long, feels like it's rushing through a lot of the history it presents. Not only does it cover 55 years of Gandhi's life, but it also deals with many complex historical and political issues. The uninformed viewer is often not given enough information to understand many of these things adequately. For example, why did so much Hindu-Muslim religious rioting occur when India became independent and Pakistan became a separate nation? Indians and Pakistanis know this history, but I feel more context could have been given for others.

I found the depictions of nonviolent protesters being beaten and sometimes killed very thought provoking. I had mixed feelings about this method of resistance. While the protesters certainly showed great courage (as did civil rights workers in the U.S. during the 50s and 60s), and it was in many ways a very intelligent strategy, I don't know if if I could bring myself to do the same thing. I would feel like there was something very dishonorable about letting yourself be beaten up without doing anything to fight back. I don't buy the idea that to fight back would reduce the protesters to the same level as those (whether the British or segregationist whites in the U.S.) who were beating them and denying them freedom. By this logic, a woman who fights back when she's being raped is on the same level as the rapist!

None of this should be interpreted as a criticism of Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., or their followers--as I said, I admire them very much. I'm just stating what I feel would be my feelings and emotions if I did the same thing.

I found "Gandhi" to be a good movie, but one that, for reasons I've stated here, could have been a lot better and more sophisticated. I gave it a 7 out of 10 on Imdb.

What are your thoughts on the movie?

You're absolutely right, but as far as film making goes, this movie was an A.

VitoC,




feature film "bios" have limitations...and we're supposed to be intrigued enough to dig deeper after seeing the film.
(of course that has the effect of making the film hard to watch afterwars)

lot of parts of his life simply couldn't fit..

does anybody here own the dvd and is it extended?



What I found interesting about Gandhi's story was that he had a relatively high "station" in life. Normally, people in that position aren't motivated to agitate for change.

I found Castro's and Guevara's life stories interesting for the same reasons.

I see what you're saying. It's true that only so much can be said and depicted in two or three hours. But I still thought that "Gandhi" could have given a more complex and sophisticated portrait of the man and the events in Indian history it depicts. The movie "Patton" is also about three hours long, yet I felt it did a much better job of presenting a multi-dimensional and balanced view of it's subject than "Gandhi" did (granted, Gandhi covers a much longer time period than "Patton" does).

good comparison and point.

What you are proposing then, is a mini-series.

Which, as great a historic figure as Ghandi is...would probably not garner the viewer interest and ratings that such an effort would deserve.