From the Archives: An intelligent study of India’s man of peace

The way in which director Richard Attenborough illustrates the motivating incident of Mohandas Gandhi’s life in “Gandhi” (at the Plitt Century Plaza) tells us a lot about the film to come.

Summarily thrown out of a first-class, whites-only railway carriage onto a dark, South African train station pavement, the enraged 23-year-old Indian attorney looks around him. The Maritzberg station is almost deserted and a chill wind blows. An Indian couple watches him from across the tracks, then moves away silently. His isolation is heightened by a high-angle shot.

It was the night that Gandhi always referred to as the moment his path was set, but we cannot read his emotions. They must have included outrage, fury, a scalding humiliation, possibly even thoughts of recrimination, but they remain private until they are intellectualized in talk the next day.

Emotional empathy is the crucial missing element in “Gandhi,” and though ordinarily this would cripple a film, what’s strange is how little it finally matters. The subject itself is so compelling, the telling of it in this straightforward, earnest, intelligent manner is so absorbing that, although it feels odd not to leave the theater torn apart by the story, there is a certain peace in that, too.

Attenborough and his screenwriter, American-born John Briley, warn us in a preface that they have selectively chosen incidents from Gandhi’s life, being faithful in spirit to the record and trying to find their way to the heart of the man.

As if to confront the worst immediately, the film makers open boldly with the assassination in 1947 of the frail 79-year-old leader by a fellow Hindu who felt that Gandhi’s part in the partition of India was an act that supported the Muslims and betrayed Hinduism.

Immediately we are carried into one of the film’s most amazing mass scenes, the funeral cortege in Delhi, virtually silent except for the tread of soldiers’ boots crunching on the marigold-strewn central street and packed masses of people, millions, it seems, pressing along the route. There is poignancy in the Laertes-like pose of Nehru (Roshan Seth), sitting on the side of the flower-decked open bier, his arm stretched along it almost comfortingly, but we are emotionally unprepared for the scene. We know the loss, but we cannot feel it personally.

The body of the film with its magnificent central performance by Royal Shakespeare Company member Ben Kingsley does everything it can to make us understand India’s loss as if it were our own. Attenborough and company have begun with basics, probably realizing that there is a generation that may not even realize that the principles of nonviolence grew from the deliberations and example of one man (in living memory).

What is extraordinary is to watch those principles take hold and flower, to watch Gandhi, a bantam rooster in starched Victorian collars who could say proudly to his wife that their little sons behave “like proper English gentlemen,” become the man who wears only cloth of his own weaving and who suggests firmly that the British “just walk out” of India.

Gandhi’s self-education in passive resistance begins after the railway-station humiliation. In addition to being denied first-class accommodations, Indians under the British rule in South Africa in 1897 were also required to carry passes at all times. An awkward and unforceful speaker at first, Gandhi nevertheless used electrifying means to show his contempt for that law.

Having notified the press of his intentions, he publicly burned his pass (a gesture not without identification to young Americans of draft age). Although Attenborough stages the scene stiffly, almost undramatically, it has terrible force. The furious British policeman clubs him once, then again. Yet even from his crumpled position in the dust, Gandhi’s thin hand reaches out one more time to push the paper into the flame.

It was a small, brave act that cast a long shadow. The British press in South Africa called it “the most significant act in colonial affairs since the Declaration of Independence.” It proved to Gandhi the amazing power of nonviolence and formed a model for his behavior and that of his followers. (There is a nice irony in having South African playwright-actor Athol Fugard, a defiant spokesman against apartheid, play the repressive Gen. Jan Christian Smuts.)

After working for Indian rights in South Africa, Gandhi returned, almost as a stranger again, to India and set about, sweetly, stubbornly, implacably, freeing his home country from British rule.

Illuminating the “Great Soul” behind this astonishing feat, Kingsley doesn’t traffic in impersonation but in the illumination of Gandhi’s strength and spirit. He has exactly those qualities that biographers of the Mahatma describe: early pride, late humility, a puckish gaiety and a self-effacing sturdiness.

Screen writer Briley’s Gandhi is far simpler than the man himself — a pity, since it’s obvious that Kingsley could give us an exceedingly complex character, had it been written. But you can somehow imagine Attenborough shuddering at anything approaching a psychoanalytical approach to his beloved subject. He could not even deviate from the obvious as the final tragedy confronts us a second time. Gandhi intimates — photographer Margaret Bourke-White (Candice Bergen) and the British admiral’s daughter whose adopted Indian name was Mirabehn (Geraldine James) — are left together in his simple room as Gandhi, feeble from a final fast, is supported by his nieces on an evening prayer walk.

“What a wonderful idea, we think, the second time we will live through this cataclysmic episode through the reactions or two people close to him. Instead, we have instant-replay assassination. The dreadful massacre at Amritsar is not staged with great imagination, either, yet “workmanlike” does not do the sequence justice as the hundreds or villagers — men and women with babies — at an outlawed public gathering, are caught in the central square, rushing from one side to the other, pathetically searching for any escape from a double row of firing Gurkhas under Gen. Dyer’s implacable command.

A large and prestigious cast of British character actors, John Gielgud, Trevor Howard, John Mills and Michael Hordern are used primarily as Blimps to be deflated. Edward Fox, as Gen.’ Dyer. however, stands out with the film’s most chilling words when an inquiry into the massacre at Amritsar reveals that 1,516 casualties (379 deaths) resulted from his riflemen’s 1,650 bullets, a horrified British Investigator asks Dyer if he would have used hill truck-mounted machine gun, had he been able to maneuver it into position. “I think, probably, yes,” is the reply.

Not all the actors fare quite so well. We never understand what has motivated the British upper class Miss Slade/Mirabehn to follow the disciples of poverty, and it leaves actress James little to do but be tirelessly sappy. Candice Bergen’s Bourke-White is best not mentioned in mixed company.

Although Ian Charleson’s performance is supportive and good, it’s time “Chariots or Fire’s” Charleson played something other than clergymen. The large complement of Indian players are splendid; and something more. Tile glowingly warm Rohini Hattangady playing Mrs. Gandhi, Roshan Seth as Nehru and Alyque Padamsee as Mohammed Ali Jinnah, head of the Muslim league (who, it was said, had a problem for every solution Gandhi proposed), look so-eerily like their real counterparts that you can pick up a photograph book of Gandhi’s contemporaries and recognize each person immediately.

Attenborough’s style, measured, not flamboyant or even particularly recognizable, does not have the dramatic intensity of David Lean’s, for example. Attenborough’s fine cinematographers, Billy Williams and Ronnie Taylor, are not aiming for gasp-provoking effects. Yet, actually, the story of this small, determined figure is more than decently served by Attenborough’s self-effacement: it is illuminated sensitively and intelligently at long last.