# 166 Gandhi (1982)

Gandhi is a biopic based on the life of Mohandas Gandhi. I'll have to be careful here and refrain from expressing my opinion about this historical character. The last thing I wanna do is start a political debate, so I'll focus on the movie as a piece of art. The film covers a significant period of his life from 1893 (when he was 24) to his death in 1948, with an opening statement that "there is no way to give each year its allotted weight".

We see Gandhi's evolution from a young lawyer in a classy business suit to one of the most popular ideological leaders, who wore self-woven clothes and looked like the poorest person in India. This evolution took roughly three hours of running time, and I wish the movie was a little more fast-paced, but I guess it had to meet the demands of the genre, and I can understand that it's hard to depict 55 years of somebody's life, especially when it's full of events that influenced the whole nation.

Ben Kingsley looks so much like Gandhi, and I think he was worthy of receiving the Award as the Best Actor in a Leading Role. However, even more outstanding (and not awarded by the Academy) was the make-up. They had the same actors playing throughout the whole film, so they didn't have one actor playing "young Gandhi", another actor playing "Gandhi", and another one for "old Gandhi". The make-up made the actors look the age of their characters, which raises the question why The Curious Case of Benjamin Button received the Best Achievement Makeup award, and Gandhi didn't.

My favorite part of the movie is when Gandhi is talking to a man who killed a child because the Muslims killed his son. The road to salvation that he suggested really impressed me, I know it's pretty simple, but still, I choose it as my favorite quote for this movie. Overall, I can't say that I really enjoyed watching this film, or that it's the best biopic I've ever seen, nonetheless, it's a good one, and helped me learn stuff I had missed in history class.

Interesting fact: Ben Kingsley (born Krishna Bhanji) looked so much like Mahatma Gandhi, many natives thought him to be Gandhi's ghost. The actor's paternal family was from the Indian state of Gujarat, the same state Mahatma Gandhi was from.

Favorite quote: "I know a way out of Hell. Find a child, a child whose mother and father have been killed and raise him as your own. Only be sure that he is a Muslim and that you raise him as one".