Gandhi Review

Attenborough spent twenty years getting this made and the effort produced a monument rather than a portrait. The scale is real, the funeral sequence used something like three hundred thousand people and no visual effect has matched it since, and Billy Williams and Ronnie Taylor shoot India with genuine care rather than picture postcard flattery. Ben Kingsley is the reason to watch. He plays Gandhi across fifty years without ever settling into impersonation, catching the humour and the stubbornness and the vanity that a saint's life story would rather leave out.

The problem is the screenplay, which moves from one historical station to the next explaining each in dialogue, and which declines to engage with anything genuinely contested about the man, his treatment of his wife, his positions on caste, his later political calculations. The Amritsar massacre is staged with real force. Everywhere else the film asks for agreement rather than attention. It is a great performance inside a careful and slightly airless film.