8. Gandhi (1982)
Gandhi is the first of several entries on this list that may well get me into trouble. It's not just that the film won eight Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Ben Kingsley (sorry, Sir Ben Kingsley). It's not just the film still features on the BFI Top 100 list of British films, and the IMDb Top 250. It's that any criticism of its length would seem redundant on the basis of Richard Attenborough's opening message:
"No man's life can be encompassed in one telling. There is no way to give each year its allotted weight, to include each event, each person who helped to shape a lifetime. What can be done is to be faithful in spirit to the record and to try to find one's way to the heart of the man..." It's a noble sentiment, but here's the problem. As a director Attenborough always takes great pains to present his characters as human beings who should be taken seriously, troubled over and admired. This doubtless stems from his own career as an actor. Sometimes, however, he treats people with so much respect and admiration that the story becomes more about the reputation of a person than the person themselves. This isn't just something he's guilty of in
Gandhi; compare
A Bridge Too Far with Paul Verhoeven's
Soldier of Orange and you'll see what I mean. We get the message pretty early on in
Gandhi about just how good and important a person the Mahatma is. But because the film never goes any deeper than his reputation, it doesn't earn the three-hour running time. When you add in all the scenes of non-Indian characters speaking about how great
Gandhi is, it becomes repetitive on top of this. In Attenborough's own words,
Gandhi is thereby reduced to being "a piece of narrative, rather than a piece of cinema".