As a film lover, I have recently gotten suspicious of biopics and historical films. These kinds of movies tend to sugarcoat the truth to present almost typical Hollywood stories, for instance, making some people who weren't all that bad, the main villains, simply so the audiences can identify an antagonist (The Aviator is a big offender in this category). Gandhi (1982) falls into many of the these traps that other biopics fall into and as a result, becomes an over- glorification, a complete lie, and something that almost doesn't resemble a story, but merely a collage of events.
The film basically presents us with the major events of Gandhi's career: his time working against British oppression of Indians as a lawyer in South Africa, the Amritsar massacre, the March of Salt, Gandhi's assassination, etc. The events are simply presented, very accurately from what I read about them, but the film leaves out many things about him that weren't very noble. Reading about events in Gandhi's life from all different sources, like books and online articles, I can safely say that I am appalled by some of the things that this man has done.
When fighting British oppression of Indians in South Africa, he basically ignored native South Africans that have lived in the country much longer than any Indian or British person. Second, he was cruel to his family, so much so that his son spoke out against him and later died as a drunk; he even negatively compared his own wife to a cow. Additionally, when his wife was sick, he refused to give her British medicine and yet was willing to take it himself when he had malaria. After Hitler came to power and WWII started, he wrote to Hitler, addressing him as a friend, and after the war was over, he himself said that many of the Jews from the Holocaust should have let themselves die and submit to the oppression of the Nazis. Any sensible man or woman would know that this is could be nothing more than an insane and horrible suggestion and that it would be simply impossible to deal with the Nazis using Gandhi's ideas. This was the Gandhi that so many people idolized? I even read an article from The Guardian saying that a biography about Gandhi was forbidden for publication because it revealed too many things about his life.
Other than the fact that the film is lying to everyone who sees it, the film is just too preachy. It doesn't barrage you with moral lessons every second of screen time, but half of the dialogue is moral lessons and guidelines on life and doesn't feel very natural. Even in the beginning, when it shows Gandhi's funeral, an announcer covering the funeral outright tells the audience (indirectly) what to think of Gandhi and how others, like Albert Einstein viewed him, and that we should view him that way too. Richard Attenborough, the director and producer, was actually advised against glorifying Gandhi. I don't get why he didn't take that advice to heart, considering that this was a passion project to him. Even some of the British officials in the film act like two-dimensional bad guys. One of the only positive things I can say about this film is that Ben Kingsley nails it as this film's version of Gandhi. He makes me wish that the Gandhi that has been glorified by the world was a real person, instead of the flawed and sometimes frightening human being that actually existed on this Earth. The film also has a genuinely good message, but like I said, it's just turned into a preachy sermon throughout most of the movie.
What else can I say? I was so disappointed to realize that so much of this man's life was left out and simplified simply to be more Hollywood-friendly and attract more crowds. That is complete BS. What a movie biopic should do, I think, is have the courage to present the uglier details of a person's life and as a result, feel more challenging. Plus, don't preach a moral lesson to us if a person lived by one, because that's being unsubtle. Let us figure it out for ourselves. Some of those things I said were applied in the excellent film, Raging Bull, by Martin Scorsese. Not only is the film mostly true to life, according to Jake LaMotta, whom the film was based on, but it wasn't afraid to portray LaMotta as a brute of a man like he was in his boxing heyday and it didn't outright tell you what to think of LaMotta or how he was thinking; instead, it kept you guessing with Robert De Niro's performance and the cinematography. Gandhi is just too afraid to turn a man who undeniably made major contributions to humanity into anything less than what people wish to see him as. As a result, this film is disgraceful and is too much of a piece of Oscar bait to be genuinely good. I'm sorry, members of the Academy, but you made a terrible choice for the Best Picture of 1982.
