Screen:
Jr, Colin L Westerbeck
Screen GANDHI CLOAKED THE NAKED MAN WOULDN'T DO I ALWAYS GET nervous when someone traveling on a Columbia Pictures expense account tells me that a holy man changed his life. When Ben Kingsley...
...He gave the Gandhi project twenty years of his life...
...Whether he had a universal message for mankind I can't say...
...His historical gift was for but one adversary, the British, whom he understood because he had first adopted and then transcended their values...
...Perhaps in his former life, before playing Gandhi, he used to stay in cheaper hotels...
...He had no ulterior motives...
...He may well have known what they would do before they themselves did, as this film suggests...
...There is a passage in Gandhi's Truth where Erik Erikson, in the course of discussing a memoir by a nineteenth-century governor of Madras, speaks of the English as'' being able to do harm with such articulate and civilized self-criticism...
...Another is that every-thing we have seen from the beginning has been destined to happen...
...He is a mystery we have to solve...
...Yes," Gandhi replies with the calm of someone able to see the handwriting on the wall, "You will just walk out...
...Kingsley didn't sound as if he was surprised, so I asked whether he was...
...He had clarified himself until he was transparent^ As this movie shows, however, we continue to fret over him, trying to find a solution to what is already plain...
...My own guess is that we are fooling ourselves with such books...
...The fact is that the film's hero has been something of a non-person all along...
...This is the largest crowd scene in movie history...
...Any movie that begins at the conclusion of its story, and returns to the same scene at the end, closes a circle of fate around its characters...
...Part of the appeal India has for him is the same that it had for English merchants two-hundred years ago - cheap labor...
...The possibility of staging a spectacle like this was irresistible...
...The film reminds us of this in an almost incidental scene where journalist Margaret Bourke-White (Candice Bergen) asks Gandhi how he would deal with the Nazis...
...Yet somewhere along the line he seems to have lost sight of Gandhi himself...
...yet he's every bit as dazzled by the Raj as his forebears were...
...On the couch between us sat two Columbia publicity people whose heads turned silently from him to me and back again as if watching a match at Wimbledon...
...Atten-borough is the one with the sense of destiny, and he imposes that sense on Gandhi's story in a way that finally diminishes Gandhi's real achievement in life...
...The first time we watch the scene, we see Gandhi shot but can't hear his final words as he falls...
...Attenborough has been preoccupied elsewhere, with the sweep of history...
...In this context, Gandhi is presented as someone whose ability was not so much to shape events as to foretell them...
...He's doing penance for British colonialism...
...It must at least be said that this movie is in the mainstream of Western thinking about the Mahatma...
...Gandhi is a man who simplified his character the way he simplified his ward-robe, until he was almost naked...
...Doing so has become a cottage industry in the West, like spinning in India...
...Before we even get to the intermission, Gandhi is already about as saintly as he can get...
...I'm not sure that this background destines one to play Gandhi...
...You don't think we're just going to walk away from India, do you...
...I was also discussing in my previous column the assassina-tion scene with which Gandhi both begins and ends...
...He answered that he was struck with "how remarkable the whole pattern was," as if he had been destined to play the role...
...Get-ting inside Gandhi has become something of an obsession with us...
...Gandhi is the movie the British deserve about India, just as Apocalypse Now was the one we deserved about Vietnam...
...Atten-borough's movie is in that tradition...
...Kingsley said that when the call came - that is, the phone call from Richard Attenborough - he happened to be reading a biog-raphy of Gandhi and' 'had been praying in my heart of hearts to do a film...
...He couldn't even deal with India once independence came...
...After he had donned the rubber skull cap, mustache, dhoti and shawl of the old Gandhi, Attenborough came into the dressing room, looked at him for a few minutes, and offered him the part...
...Having first conceived of this movie in the early 1960s, Attenborough has worked on the project ever since...
...In the resulting movie he has replicated the Empire with the same indomitable energy that built it in the first place...
...To have gotten inside Gandhi is not the only implication that the assassination scene at the end has...
...When Ben Kingsley told me that playing the title role in Gandhi had had this effect on him, we were sitting in his suite at the Regency on Park Ave...
...The second time, the screen goes black as the bullets hit, and we only hear what he says: "Oh, God...
...Sir Richard got his start in films forty years ago in Noel Coward's In Which We Serve, and Gandhi suggests that he is serving still...
...But his success as a political leader was tied to a very specinc time and place...
...Nor do I think that Attenborough was in a better position to appreciate the Mahatma's life...
...God.'' The implication is that by the end we have gotten inside Gandhi, that we are now hearing the inner voice to which he has been listening...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.WESTERBECK, JR...
...the Viceroy splutters...
...Like Kingsley, he was reading a biography of the Mahatma when the call came, from his own inner voices...
...At the same time that the film is spiritualizing and immortaliz-ing Gandhi, it is also giving him less than his due as a real man who lived at a particular historical moment...
...This it was that made him exceptional, perhaps even unique among modern men...
...He had released all suppressed desire, which flew up out of his body like birds set free from a cage...
...It was, I suspect, what really lured Attenborough to India...
...What we can't understand about him, or accept, is that what you saw was what you got...
...Gandhi's life is a kind of standpoint around which the director has organized the endless succession of crowd scenes that make up his film...
...To conceive of history as a continuous pageant like this obscures its complex-ity...
...He couldn't have re-created Gandhi's funeral with 300,000 extras at Pinewood Studio, as he did in Delhi's Pajpath where the actual funeral procession was held...
...There's nowhere new for the role to go, so it becomes static, a mere rehearsal of the Gandhian postures and gestures at which Kingsley is an expert...
...Attenborough practically made the movie into what India was for its subject, a holy mission...
...Since psychoanalysis is a key specially fitted to hidden truths, Gandhi made, from a Western point of view, the perfect subject for a biography by Erik Erikson...
...The film implies that the simple man who is its subject was able to make his mark because history itself is simple-minded...
...Asked to do a screen test, as were other candidates for the role, Kingsley got no further than make-up...
...Nevertheless, the film gives me the feeling that the person I am getting inside of is Attenborough, not Gandhi...
...A crucial scene according to Kingsley - one of the "hinge points of history," he called it - is when Gandhi is summoned to a meeting with the Viceroy of India (John Mills...
...Kingsley is himself an Indian, though he has long passed for white on the English stage...
...The answer, of course, is that he couldn't have...
...As I mentioned in my previous column, he changed his name from Krishna Ranji to Ben Kingsley so he wouldn't be typecast in ethnic roles...
...I think that Gandhi had, if not foresight, at least a great deal of insight into the British...
Vol. 110 • January 1983 • No. 1
