Screen:
Jr, Colin L Westerbeck
Screen PLAYING GANDHI THE METHOD DIDN'T WORK RICHARD ATTENBOROUGH'S Gandhi begins and ends with Gandhi's assassination. The camera picks out the steely-eyed Hindu fanatic, whose name was Nathuram...
...The second time, the screen goes black as the bullets hit, and we only hear what Gandhi says: "Oh, God...
...They were intended to help him identify with the part he was playing...
...Gandhi gave up his English ways and returned to those of the village...
...He watched five hours of documentary footage of Gandhi, and kept photos of the Mahatma all around the walls of his hotel room so that he could imitate Gandhi physically...
...This reasonable explanation was, in the way Kingsley gave it, rather moving...
...You have to maintain just the right tension, or the thread will snap...
...Movies force the Method on actors, even classically trained ones like "Where you have the audience in the theater," he said, "you have nature in a film...
...It was clear, anyhow, that he didn't intend Gandhi's dying words to sound as banal as they seemed to me...
...Pressing in with the pious who throng around Gandhi when he appears, Godse goes down on his hands and knees before the Mahatma as if in adoration...
...He modified his diet to bring it more in line with Gandhi's vegetarianism...
...Assimilating Gandhi's character by approximating his habits like this is what I meant when I said Kinglsey had done a Method preparation for the role...
...That Kingsley's family came from the same little village where Gandhi was born might have been yet another reason for the actor to identify with the Mahatma...
...At one point I asked him why he changed his name from Krishna Ranji to Ben Kingsley, and he said, without evasion, that he didn't want to be typecast as an Indian when he was beginning his career...
...He responded to my question about them by comparing them to the final utterances of great stage characters, particularly to Hamlet's "The rest is silence...
...The first of two parts) COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.STERBECK, JR...
...He sounds more like a man who has just returned to a parking lot to find that someone has dented his car and driven off without leaving a name...
...For Kingsley, though, these techniques didn't work...
...In movies, it's the reality of being on location - in "nature" - that infuses an actor with the feelings appropriate to the character...
...He practiced yoga in order to be able to assume Gan-dhian postures...
...The first time we watch the scene, we see Gandhi fall as if from the assassin's point of view, but we cannot hear Gandhi's dying words amidst the commotion...
...He may have been depending on the former to give the latter some meaning now lost...
...The machine lets you know what your state of mind is...
...Since I imagined that Kingsley had given these last words more thought than any others in the film, I asked him about them when he was in New York promoting Gandhi...
...The note he strikes is one of slight dejection...
...Because he's used to thinking only as a stage actor, it probably didn't occur to him that the look on his face and the sound of his voice could be separated...
...The camera picks out the steely-eyed Hindu fanatic, whose name was Nathuram Godse, mingling with the crowd that is gathering for the afternoon prayer Gandhi (Ben Kingsley) will lead...
...Kingsley has been a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company for fifteen years, and Gandhi is his first movie...
...This may explain why his delivery of the last line sounds oddly out of context...
...Kingsley still calls himself Ben Kingsley...
...But I don't think that was the effect...
...The inflection Kinglsey gives to those final words struck me as very peculiar...
...With such roles, Kingsley said, there is a "culmination" of the character's whole life in his closing line...
...Another possibility, if Kingsley's voice fell, would be that Gandhi's soul was weighed down by earthly cares - by recognition, perhaps, that in his death was the failure of his effort to keep peace between Hindus and Moslems...
...Still, I don't think that having passed for white on the English stage for many years, and conceiving of Gandhi as if he were Hamlet, was finally the best way to become attuned to Gandhi's inner voices...
...Despite his references to the classical stage, and his own classical training as an actor, a great deal of "Method" preparation seemed to have gone into his performance...
...By literally taking the character's place, the actor gets inside the character himself, which is what the Method requires...
...Kingsley's voice does fall, but not with great moment...
...Had his voice risen it might have suggested that Gandhi was ascending too, his thoughts already fixed on a higher realm of existence...
...Godse fires point blank into Gandhi's chest...
...It's as if he couldn't decide which reading of the line was correct, so he compromised between them...
...I doubt it...
...At some point a small bowl, the sort that might be used for alms or incense or rice, is dropped...
...Gandhi's and Hamlet's both have the same quality, "a tinkling perfection...
...Then when Gandhi's aides try to move Godse out of their leader's way, he suddenly straightens up with a pistol in his hands...
...Spinning was, I felt, a secret key to Gandhi's character and temperament," Kingsley told me...
...I was surprised to learn that he didn't know the two death scenes differed...
...He was speaking of how the actor gets the feedback he needs from the environment in which he works...
...He even insisted, upon being offered a spinning wheel with a tiny motor concealed in it, that he would master the ancient handcraft just as Gandhi had...
...Kingsley spoke repeatedly of how moved he was to be in India when he played Gandhi, especially to be standing, when he did the death scene, only a few feet from where Gandhi had actually stood...
...The result is an ambivalence that not only neutralizes his delivery of the dying words, but that runs through his whole performance...
...By the time Kinglsey had carried the analogy that far, he was beginning to feel uncomfortable with it (so was I), and the conversation went elsewhere...
...but even they couldn't overcome certain inhibitions that I suspect he felt in the role...
...The implication is that by the end of the film we have gotten inside Gandhi, that we can now hear the inner voice to which he has been listening...
Vol. 109 • December 1982 • No. 22
