I had never seen Out of Africa before, and I really wanted to love it. I am a fan of Sydney Pollack as a director. I am a fan of Meryl Streep and I am a fan of Robert Redford. One of the reasons I had shied away from seeing this picture until now was because it always looked like it would be kind of boring, and unfortunately my fears were confirmed. I did like Out of Africa, and I thought it was a well-made and well-crafted film. It has a lot of depth to the story and is thematically very strong. But it is too long and too slow and too meandering for my taste.

This is what I liked about Out of Africa.

I liked the thematic elements of the film, although I feel that the script was a little too on the nose with them. This is a film about dealing with the consequences of your actions and understanding that for all thins there is a price. The film begins with Karen (Streep) suggesting a marriage of convenience to Baron Bror Blixen. It should work out well for both of them, as Karen will get the title of Baroness and Bror will get access to her money since he’s run through all of his. They agree to purchase a dairy farm in Kenya, which at the time (early 20^th Century), was under British rule. Karen finds out almost immediately that there could be a steep price to pay in this relationship as Bror decides to turn the farm into a coffee plantation instead without consulting her. She pays an even steeper price later on when she contracts syphilis from him due to his philandering.

Karen pays another price later in the film after she falls in love with Denys Finch-Hatten, a big game hunter who is the type of man who can’t be tied to any one place for very long. The price she pays for falling in love with him is allowing him to continue to live his life the way he wants. He’ll always love her, but he’ll never be able to settle down with her. Whether or not she’s able to pay that price will determine how happy she can be.

I liked Meryl Streep in this film. It’s hard to not like Meryl Streep in any film she’s in, but she is particularly outstanding in Out of Africa with her Dutch accent, her subtle emotions and her quiet determination. Meryl Streep would join Clark Gable (Mutiny on the Bounty, It Happened One Night, Gone With the Wind), Talia Shire (The Godfather, The Godfather Part 2, Rocky) and Diane Keaton (The Godfather, The Godfather Part 2, Annie Hall) as a star of three Best Picture winners. Even though she played more supporting roles in The Deer Hunter and Kramer Vs. Kramer, she was still an integral part of both of those films, and when combined with other powerful films that she had already starred in like Silkwood and Sophie’s Choice among many others, Streep used Out of Africa to continue her steady climb towards becoming one of Hollywood’s all-time greats.

Statistics aside, Streep’s performance of Karen in Out of Africa is sublime. How many times have you watched a film and an actor has a hard time managing an accent, be it an English accent or a Boston accent or a New York accent. There will be scenes where the accent isn’t realistic or drops entirely. Streep performed this film with a Dutch accent, which is one of the more difficult accents to get right because it very easily could slip into a German accent. That doesn’t happen with Streep. They darkened her hair, and made her look older than she was at the time, and combined with the accent, Streep transformed into Karen so that I really felt that I was watching a character, and not an actor playing that character.

One of the things that I truly loved about Streep’s performance in Out of Africa was its subtlety. This was a dignified woman that she was playing, who had to deal with hardship after hardship after hardship. There were many times throughout the film where a lesser performer would have succumbed to melodrama, cursing and shaking her fists at the world. I’m certain that Pollack had a thing or two to do with her performance as well, but there was none of that in this film. This is a woman who has brought a lot of her problems on to herself (more on that in a little bit), but she has a lot of problem throughout the film. There are three especially devastating things that happen to Karen in this film, and I’m sure there must have been at least some temptation to push the emotion and the melodrama, but they wisely avoided it. Streep would receive one of her astounding 17 Academy Award nominations for her work on this film, and she probably should have gone home with the statue for Best Actress that year.

I liked Robert Redford as Denys. This is probably not one of Redford’s most memorable roles, and he was not nominated for Best Actor, but he was perfect for it. To me, this role was reminiscent of his role of Hubbell in The Way We Were, although he’s a much more confident man in Out of Africa. To me the similarities come from each man’s inability to commit. Denys is a free spirit who loves to live the life of a big game hunter in the wilds of Africa. He doesn’t feel the need to have an official piece of paper in order to prove that he loves someone, and he expects that the woman who loves him will respect the fact that ne needs his freedom. If she can’t commit to that, then he can’t commit to her. This all comes to a head with Karen, who at first either believed that she could live with it or that she could tame this untamable man. As symbolized at the end of the film, Denys is the personification of the lions that he sometimes hunts. He is majestic and beautiful and loyal, but is also wild and will hurt you if you try to get too close.

Again, Redford’s performance was subtle as well. I will submit to you that Robert Redford rarely if ever played a character that was susceptible to melodrama. He played most of his characters with an even keel that still never lacked for intensity. Denys was no different. He had the same reserved dignity that Karen had, but he wasn’t ever afraid to ruffle feathers with a wise-crack which helped to give his character the depth that it needed to be likable. In fact, I found Denys, despite his personal short-comings to be the most likable character in the film.

I liked the cinematography. It reminded me a little bit of Lawrence of Arabia with its sweeping panoramic shots and shots that were specifically designed to show how small the people were in comparison the vastness of that great continent.

This is what I didn’t like about Out of Africa.

It was too long. I mentioned a moment ago that I liked the cinematography, especially the sweeping shots of the African landscapes. However the problem was that there were too many of them and they started to feel redundant. I’m sure that the temptation to show as much of that footage as possible must have been impossible to shake, and it leaves us as the audience with an interesting duality. Is it possible to have too much of a good thing? I believe that it is, and that they could have cut some time off of the film had they been a bit more judicious in how many establishing shots of landscapes they decided to show.

I also felt that, overall, the story dragged, especially in the first half of the film. It did pick up quite a bit when Karen and Denys finally get together and their story starts to drive the narrative, but this is a boring movie through the first half, and I found it difficult to get engaged. I think one of the things that made it boring was the fact that Karen brought so much of her misfortune on to herself. It was hard to feel any compassion for her because she knew she was entering into a marriage with a man whom she did not love and who did not love her. I don’t know what she was expecting or what she hoped to get out of it. In fact, there is no motivation for Karen at all other than getting the farm running. But even that doesn’t seem like it’s anything we should care about because she didn’t even want a coffee plantation. She wanted a dairy farm.

There are some times in the film where Karen wants to teach local native children to read despite the protestations of the local chief, but even after she has them in school there is not tension regarding how the chief is going to react. It’s just something that happens and then we move on. The same thing happens when World War I breaks out. Many of the men leave to fight and Karen is told she can’t stay at the house because the army cannot protect her from the natives. She decides, against the will of Bror to bring him and the others fresh supplies. On the trek, they become lost and there are a couple of times when it looks like they’ll be attacked by local warring parties. But nothing ever happens, and so any drama that could have been built by the tension that never happens is evaporated. That is the ultimate problem with the first half of Out of Africa. Pollack and screenwriter Kurt Luedtke set up situations with the potential for tension and drama, but then don’t pay them off.

In spite of the praise that I wrote earlier on behalf of Streep’s performance, I didn’t like Karen as a character. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I liked her well enough, but I didn’t care about her as much as I should have. As mentioned, she brought many of her problems on to herself by entering in to this marriage of convenience, and she has no real motivation until the second half of the film when she wants to have a lasting relationship with Denys. In order to care about a character, I need to know what she wants. If she has put herself in a bad situation, I want to see that she’s learning and growing, and in fact we do see a lot of growth from Karen by the end of the film. She starts out the film as a naïve European who has no idea how the world works to a hardened veteran of life’s challenges who now knows that nothing comes without a cost. The problem for me is that it took way to long for the film to get to that point or to the point where her character was even starting to evolve. That made it difficult for me to engage emotionally in the film, and I felt like the film suffered for it.

Did the Academy get it right?

My initial response to that question is no. I suspect that this is one of those years that if the Academy had a do-over, the Oscar would have gone to The Color Purple. That is an overly long film as well, and it also has a bit of a meandering story, but it is a lot more dramatic and I cared a lot more about the characters in that film than I did about the characters in Out of Africa. The other thing that I liked about The Color Purple is that it has a surprising amount of humor in it to help balance out the heavy drama. Personally, I feel that film was much more deserving of the Oscar. Prizzi’s Honor and Kiss of the Spider Woman were also nominated that year. William Hurt won the Oscar for Best Actor as a homosexual in a South American prison for immoral behavior in the latter film which I think might have been just a little too edgy for its time, and might have had better luck had it come out more recently. My favorite film of this group of nominees, however, is Witness, and that’s the film that I would have voted for, had I had a vote in 1985. It won for Best Original Screenplay and Harrison Ford was nominated for Best Actor for his portrayal of John Book, the Philadelphia detective who has to hide out in an Amish community when an Amish boy witnesses a murder and Book discovers that his superiors are behind the crime. However I understand that Witness was not on the scale or scope of films like Out of Africa or even The Color Purple. Really, it should have come down to those two films in 1985 and unfortunately the wrong film won.

Amadeus is the best film of the 80’s. I totally understand anyone who would want to make a case for Raging Bull, E.T., The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Do the Right Thing, The Shining, or Platoon (which we’ll get to in a couple of weeks). Those are all excellent films, and there are many other excellent films that were released during the 80’s that could be considered as the decade’s best. AFI has Amadeus ranked #53 on its original Top 100, and it was the 3^rd highest ranking for an 80’s film behind Raging Bull (#24) and E.T. (#25). But I part company with AFI once again here, as for my money, Amadeus separates itself from every other film of the decade by being the complete package.

Amadeus has it all. It has an exquisitely written screenplay with dialogue that is written like poetry. There is subtext throughout with many examples of Mozart (Tom Hulce) naively insulting the Court Composer Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) over and over until nearly the end. It has characters with layer upon layer of depth and they are all stripped bare by the end. The production design of Amadeus was created with the meticulous care of one of Mozart’s operas and the same can be said for the costume design. And the acting. What can one say about the acting except that it is superb?

One of the aspects of this film that I find so appealing, and also that make it fairly unique is the fact that Salieri is the protagonist of the film, but also the film’s villain. In typical villain fashion, Salieri is the Hero of his own story, but it is his desire to thwart Mozart at every turn, and that desire and passion eventually grow through his jealousy to a homicidal level. I find the character of Salieri to be one of the most intriguing characters that I’ve ever seen in cinema. He narrates the story to us through his older self after his guilt drives him to a failed attempt at suicide. Salieri is a pious man who firmly believes that God gave him the gift of creating music so that Salieri could bring glory to Him. Salieri’s desire is to be the world’s most renowned composer for that reason, or so he would have us believe. Salieri, in fact believes that he’s doing God’s work when he becomes Court Composer for Emperor Joseph II of Austria. Enter Mozart. Salieri has heard of him and knows that he has gifts that may even exceed his own. But when he sees that Mozart is a cavorting womanizing clown, he can’t believe that the talent is true. After hearing a concerto, he conceded its brilliance but figures that it must have been luck more than anything and determines that Mozart is nothing more than a fluke. However when Mozart’s wife Constantine brings Salieri samples of his music to apply on his behalf for students, Salieri sees the brilliance in it immediately. He knows that this man is composing on a level to which Salieri has always aspired but will never be able to attain. What’s more, Salieri starts to resent God for giving these abilities not to one who has devoted his life and given all credit to Him, but to one who lives a life of frivolity and excess and who seems to not respect at all the talent that he has been given.

What director Milos Forman and screenwriter Peter Shaffer did with Salieri was brilliant. They created a character that has devoted himself to two things: God and music. We learn very early in the film that those two things are intertwined in his life as to make one inseparable from the other. He believes that God has put him on this Earth to make beautiful music and he creates this music to bring pleasure to God. It is obvious to Salieri that God would surely make him the greatest composer in the world. Unfortunately for Salieri, that’s not the way God works. Of course when Salieri meets this boorish, childish little man who is nevertheless able to take a piece of music that Salieri labored over to make as fine as he could, and then not only play it from memory after only hearing it once, but then improve on it several times over in a matter of minutes, it’s not a wonder that Salieri would think that God was mocking him. It’s not surprising then, that he would tell God that they are now enemies, and his whole purpose in life now is to belittle and destroy Mozart so that no one will hear his music.

For his part, Mozart was a lovable rogue. The role would be a signature one for Tom Hulce, and the recognizable laugh would be one of the signature motifs of the film. It made him stand out from the rest of the characters in several ways. First of all, it was inappropriately loud, so men of certain social standing would be put off by it because it showed him to be less sophisticated than they. It made Mozart approachable. There are many reasons that this film should be required viewing for any aspiring screenwriter, but one of the biggest reasons is for how Shaffer made Mozart relatable. In the character of Mozart we have a man who was by all accounts a genius. He had perhaps the greatest musical mind of any person to ever walk the earth and he was a man of the European elite of the 18^th Century. How in the world could an audience seeing this film more than 200 years after his death relate to him? One of the ways would be to give him a funny laugh. It might sound ridiculous on the surface, but what better way to humanize a character, and bring him to a more relatable level than by making him sound funny or nervous when he laughs.

The other thing that Forman and Shaffer did to effectively humanize Mozart was they gave him faults. The whole point of this story is the crux between how such an imperfect man could create such perfect music. And make no mistake, Forman and Shaffer’s Mozart was an imperfect man to be sure. He was a worldly man who was easily seduced by worldly pleasures. He was not necessarily a man who practiced infidelity, as he was never shown to be unfaithful to his wife, at least as it applies to relations with other women. Mozart was certainly addicted to partying and drinking, but he never seemed to allow those vices to affect his work, at least in terms of writing his symphonies. These vices did, however, sometimes prevent him from procuring work, and would eventually drive his wife away.

Here is one other thing in relation to the character of Mozart that Forman and Shaffer did that was so effective in making Mozart not only relatable, but also likable. They not only gave him faults that humanized him, but they also gave him vulnerability. Not unlike Salieri, Mozart was a man who needed approval. Whereas Salieri looked for approval from the Emperor and from God, Mozart desperately needed approval from his father. That is a need that many, many people have and it helps garner sympathy for Mozart as the film goes on, and that need for his father’s approval and ultimately forgiveness end up being used against him as weapons by Salieri. That is brilliant storytelling when one character takes another characters greatest need and uses it against him. It’s especially brilliant in a story like this that is told from the point of view of the villain, and he’s using the weakness of the Hero against him.

One other character component that is important to mention is also very prevalent in Amadeus, and that is the character arc. One thing that Salieri’s villainous behavior does is make ironically make Mozart into a better, more responsible person. Even as Salieri deceives Mozart into thinking that he’s helping him, at times he unwittingly does, even as Mozart unwittingly continues to insult him. And yet, even as he has Mozart right where he wants him, when Mozart desperately needs his help, Salieri is ever the artist and assists Mozart in completing his requiem. He becomes a part of Mozart’s genius and sees it from the inside. But then, through his own doing, Mozart dies and the glory eludes him. Naturally, he blames his misfortune yet again on God. He seemed to be coming to the point where he finally had the ability to appreciate Mozart’s genius. In fact, he actually does reach that point just as it is taken from him by Mozart’s passing. It is a wonderful character arc that regresses, grows and then regresses again.

This brings me to the theme of this film, which is that life isn’t fair and no amount of jealousy or vindictiveness will make it so. Whether in art, music or business, there will be people that have to give 100% effort 100% of the time just to get by. And then there will be those other people who have a natural affinity or a God-given talent for the work. Life just comes a lot easier to those people, and there is nothing that we can do about it. I feel that what Forman and Shaffer were saying in this film is that those people should be celebrated or at the very least appreciated. Envy is an ugly state to be in and it has the potential to bring out the worst in all of us, just as it did in Salieri. The film is telling us that instead of feeling this envy towards another’s natural gifts, we should revel in them with those people. We should feel blessed to be in the presence of greatness rather than attempting to stifle it or hoping for its ruin. This type of greatness doesn’t come around very often, so it should be celebrated when it does.

With those thematic qualities and the performances of the actors and the overall craftsmanship of the filmmaking, I feel like Amadeus is very much a thinking person’s film without crossing into the realm of being pretentious. I’m sure that the air of pretense has kept people from seeing this film, and I can say confidently that it is not a pretentious film in the least. The overall humanization of the characters and the very basic thematic elements keep it from becoming the pretentious film that many period pieces are, especially when they have to do with opera and classical music. If you have never seen Amadeus, I cannot recommend it highly enough. Don’t be afraid of the fact that it’s a period piece about classical music. Embrace the fact that it’s an outstanding, entertaining film that you can enjoy and savor.

Did the Academy get it right?

Yes they did. I feel it was the best film of the decade, so surely it was the best film of the year, although it did have some relatively stiff competition, especially from The Killing Fields, which was a powerful film about a journalist covering the civil war in Cambodia that came on the heels of the United States pulling out of Vietnam and the surrounding region. Things go from bad to worse when Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge take over and systematically kill more than 2 million of their own citizens. Even though Amadeus is hardly uplifting, it’s entirely possible that The Killing Fields was just too heavy and depressing of a film to take home the top prize. Plus, Amadeus is just better. The other films up for Best Picture in 1984 were A Passage to India, Places in the Heart and A Soldier’s Story, with the latter two films dealing with themes of racism, both institutional and personal, and the former being the final film of David Lean. They were all excellent films in their own rights, but none of them were to the standard of Amadeus, which was the best film of 1984 and the best film of the entire decade.

Terms of Endearment is an exceptional, if unremarkable film that has some sterling individual performances, but like its immediate predecessors of the eighties, it turned out to be less than the sum of its parts. Now don’t get me wrong. I liked Terms of Endearment. It’s a tad sentimental for my taste, and the structure of the story isn’t as strong as I normally like. However, there is a lot of emotion in this script and it is populated by relatable characters, most of whom garner a lot of empathy from the audience.

Here is what I liked about Terms of Endearment.

First of all, I loved Jack Nicholson as Garrett Breedlove, the former astronaut who moves in next door to Aurora Greenway (Shirley MacLaine). Even though his last name is a tad on the nose, this fun-loving playboy has an inability to settle down, and yet in the end is able to show the compassion that we never would have thought possible. Burt Reynolds was initially offered the role, but he turned it down. I am a fan of Burt Reynolds, but while that move was devastating to his career, it was great for the rest of us, because this became another of Nicholson’s signature roles. Nicholson played the role of Garrett with a devilish panache that was the perfect counter balance to MacLaine’s uptight and proper Aurora. They say that opposites attract, and there might not be a couple in the history of cinema as far on extreme poles as these two characters. And yet, writer/director James L. Brooks created a chemistry that is second to none. These are two people who have no business being together, and yet you can’t imagine them apart. Nicholson’s patented delivery of his lines and his onscreen confidence help to create that chemistry, and he was deserving of the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor that he won for his work on this picture.

On the other side of that coin, I also loved the performance of Shirley MacLaine as Aurora. She’s a woman who lost her husband at a young age and her daughter Emma (Debra Winger) was more than a daughter to her. She was also a confidant and a best friend. One gets the sense at first that Aurora doesn’t like Emma’s betrothed Flip Horton (Jeff Daniels) simply because she doesn’t want to lose Emma to the inevitable idea of getting married. We find out later in the film, however, that Aurora was right about Flip and Emma probably could have done better. What she doesn’t see, though, is that Emma probably didn’t deserve better. More on that in a little bit. We learn very early that Aurora has had many suitors over the years, and she has ruthlessly and callously turned them all away. Yet her charms keep them all coming back for more. But she finds her match in Garrett. All of these other suitors would drown her in platitudes and poetry, but the straight talking Garrett isn’t afraid to tell her to have a drink in order to kill the bug that’s up her ass. I think that’s how Brooks along with Nicholson and MacLaine were so successful in creating the chemistry between these two characters. For the first time in her life someone besides her daughter was talking honestly to Aurora and not just telling her what they thought she wanted to hear. Garrett was absolutely himself with her, and that included saying inappropriate and lascivious things to her. While it may have been off-putting to Aurora at first, she was soon taken in by his charms and this oddest of couples became one of Hollywood’s great love stories.

I also liked the relationship between Aurora and Emma, which is the driving relationship of the film. We see from the beginning that these two mean everything to each other, and Emma is the light in Aurora’s world. The scene in the hospital where Aurora comes out demanding that the nurses give Emma the shot of painkillers is intense and heartbreaking. Aurora’s reaction when Emma looks at her as she dies in the hospital is just as heartbreaking. The reason we feel so much emotion in those scenes is because we’ve spent the entire film watching the relationship between these two people and we care about both of them because we know how devastating it would be for one of them to lose the other. That all happens in the script and any aspiring screenwriter can learn a thing or two about developing relationships by watching Terms of Endearment.

I liked how Brooks showed us the slow disintegration of Emma’s marriage with Flip. This wasn’t something that happened over days or months, but actually slowly was carried out over a decade. We watch as Flip continues to fail, and we suspect along with Emma that he’s having affairs, but we never see it until much later in the film. Yet without being certain that Flip is having an affair, Emma goes out and has an affair of her own with a local banker named Sam Burns (John Lithgow). But even the affairs don’t come right away. Flip moves them away from Houston to Iowa where he has a chance to teach, but their money situation is always tight, causing tempers to boil over, even in front of their young sons. The lack of money and the constant anger over that situation naturally drive Emma and Flip away from each other, so neither can really be blamed for seeking comfort elsewhere. Brooks did a masterful job of meticulously building the tension around this relationship so that its dissolution felt natural and almost predictable.

Ultimately Terms of Endearment is a film about relationships, and how those relationships are either strengthened or unravel by the amount of effort we put in to them. This is never more clearly shown then when Emma’s sons Tommy and Teddy come to see her in the hospital as she’s dying of cancer. They’re just boys, and Tommy, the oldest is barely ten years-old. Her resents his mother because he feels that she drove his father away and she’s never been able to properly take care of them. Now she’s on the verge of leaving them, and his youth prevents him from understanding why she can’t make herself better. This is the last time he’ll ever see her and he can’t look her in the eye, and he can’t even tell her that he loves her. In a last unselfish moment of motherly devotion Emma tells him that someday he’ll look back on this moment with regret because he never told her that he loved her. She tells him not to let that happen. She understands what he’s feeling and she knows that he loves her.

I should also point out that this was the third Best Picture winner for Shirley MacLaine, having also starred in Around the World in 80 Days and The Apartment. In doing so, she joined Clark Gable, Talia Shire and Diane Keaton in the 3-Timers club.

Here’s what I didn’t like about Terms of Endearment.

For the most part I felt that Debra Wingers performance as Emma was terrific. She was likable and energetic and she came across as the type of person with whom you would want to be friends or even lovers. She had charisma and charm and she turned Emma into a character with whom the audience could be emotionally engaged. Winger was nominated for Best Actress, but would lose out to the more deserving MacLaine. She deserved the nomination; however she was not believable in the third act when she was dying of cancer. When she first is diagnosed and when she’s told that it’s terminal, she’s actually very good. She’s emotionally devastated and then angry before finally coming to grips and accepting it. What I thought was missing was physical weakness. There is no weakness in her voice or in her demeanor, even as she’s supposed to be on death’s doorstep when she’s talking to her boys. In fact, in the scene where she actually dies, she moves her arm to be more comfortable like you might move it before you fall asleep. There was no labor to it. There was not struggle, and it took away the believability from the moment and lessened my emotional engagement.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the story structure. For the most part, the dialogue was top notch, especially the dialogue written for Garrett and for Aurora. Nicholson has some of his signature lines in this film, and most of the dialogue is wonderful. However this isn’t a film with great structure, at least in the classical sense, and it was hard for me to get into the story primarily because it was so character driven rather than plot driven. That’s just something from my personal taste. I generally prefer plot driven stories where the characters learn and grow due to what happens to them on their journeys where they have a clear goal that they either accomplish or don’t. Terms of Endearment, as mentioned earlier, is about relationships and how the evolve over the course of a lifetime. It can make for some great acting, and does in this film, but it’s not my favorite way to tell a story.

Did the Academy get it right?

I am inclined to say that they did not get it right in 1984. Terms of Endearment is a fine film, and I understand why it won. It has a powerful and emotional ending that I am sure stuck with people long after they left the theater. I’m sure that it was the ending that won this picture the Oscar. However, pound for point I feel that The Right Stuff is the better film. Now, The Right Stuff comes in at 192 minutes, similarly to the previous year’s winner, Gandhi. Perhaps the Academy didn’t want to set a trend of marathon films winning the Oscar. I could also make a case for Tender Mercies winning the Oscar in 1984, as it also has some strong emotion to it, and it was carried by a powerful performance by Robert Duvall in one of his signature roles. The Big Chill is another film about relationships and is probably more entertaining than Terms of Endearment, but not nearly as emotional. All in all, I don’t have a real strong opinion on 1983, as it wasn’t the greatest year of films. While I prefer The Right Stuff, I don’t think that it’s a crime that Terms of Endearment won.

Gandhi is a different kind of epic than the films like Ben-Hur and Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge on the River Kwai that won Best Picture in previous decades. Gandhi is a bio-pic/historical drama that follows a man who preached and lived peace as a means of defeating his oppressors. After a long, difficult struggle, he finally saw his dream realized, but it came with several heavy price tags along every step of the way, and his final dream realized wasn’t what he had dreamed it would be.

As we all know, Mahatma Gandhi was the leader of the peaceful movement of non-compliance against the English occupation of India during the first half of the twentieth Century. This film portrays his life as a young lawyer speaking out against racial inequality in South Africa to his decades-long struggle to peacefully achieve independence for India from British rule. This we know, but what I thought the film did so effectively was that it showed Gandhi’s motivation behind doing this in peaceful ways rather than inciting violence. The easy answer is that he was a man of peace, and that is true. However, there was also a very practical reason behind achieving independence through peaceful means that went much deeper than simply being against violence. Gandhi believed that they had to show the world that they were worthy of independence. He felt that the Indian people needed to demonstrate that they had to the tolerance and capacity to lead their own civil society by acting civilly in the face of oppression. Not only that, he knew that reacting to the violence with non-violence would garner sympathy for their cause around the world and apply political pressure to the British to withdraw. He preached these ideas over the protestations of even his closest supporters, famously proclaiming, “An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.”

Personally, I felt that showing Gandhi’s motivation and determination for peaceful means to the resolution of this conflict was the driving force behind this film, and one of the reasons it came away with the Oscar. Otherwise, I wasn’t really blown away by it. At 192 minutes, it’s one of the longest films to ever win Best Picture, but the length of the film didn’t bother me too much. Gandhi was truly a great man and the events of his early life impacted the way he lived his later years, so it was important to show as much of that as possible. I did feel, however, that the first half of the film dragged. It was never quite boring, but it wasn’t terribly exiting filmmaking due to the fact that a lot of it was exposition. I understand that it was all important, because it does lay the foundation for the man he would become. For example, there is a scene when he’s living in South Africa where he’s leading a peaceful protest against a new policy requiring all Indians to carry work permits. He burns several permits, even as he’s being beaten by police officers, until he’s beaten to the point where he can’t continue, and he’s arrested. What the scene does is it shows his discomfort in being a leader of a cause and speaking to large groups. After getting out of jail, he speaks to another group of people decrying another unjust law stating that the government will only recognize Christian marriages under the law. By now Gandhi has a charisma that is more of a leadership quality than magnetism, and he’s able to simplify complex issues in ways that the masses can understand, especially when it comes to non-violent protest.

So yes, this exposition was very necessary for what would happen later in the film, and I don’t know how they could have made the film without it. That I suppose is the crux of the problem, and something that film makers and screenwriters have to wrestle with every day. How do we get in as much story development and character development as possible without stalling the story? And the thing about this particular story is that I don’t think there is much that could have been cut in order to streamline it. It feels like every scene in this film was necessary to the progression of the story or to the development of the characters. It’s just a film that has to be long, and if you like films like that then you will like Gandhi. If you don’t, then you won’t.

I think what they did very effectively in Gandhi was that Director Richard Attenborough and screenwriter John Briley gave Gandhi a very effective Hero’s Journey point of view. In fact, from the Hero’s Journey point of view, Gandhi’s time in South Africa is his Ordinary World, and ironically, when he returns home to India is when he Crosses the First Threshold in to the Special World of the Adventure. A careful analysis shows that all of the stages are represented especially well in this film. We are presented with his Ordinary World of South Africa, and his first Call to Adventure is when he’s kicked out of first class on his train, and actually kicked off the train entirely because Indians aren’t allowed in Frist Class, and no one believes he’s a lawyer. The Refusal of the Call is when Gandhi refuses to accept a violent response to the injustices that his people are experiencing. There are several Mentors that Gandhi Meets over the course of the film, but the one that sets him on his main path, is Khan, a kindly man who would teach him about getting his message to the masses. An interesting note is that Khan was played by Amish Puri, who is perhaps best known to American audiences as Mola Ram, the kidnapping, heart-harvesting villain from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

In fact another of Gandhi’s allies, Roshan Seth, played Pandit Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister. He was also in The Temple of Doom as Chattar Lal, the head servant at Pankot Palace. Pandit is introduced after Gandhi Crosses the First Threshold into India during the Tests, Allies and Enemies section of the script, along with several characters who will serve those roles, and some will shapeshift between allies and enemies. The Approach is Gandhi spreading the word of non-violence and non-compliance. The Supreme Ordeal doesn’t actually involve Gandhi directly, but happens when more than 1,500 people are massacred at Amristar. The Reward is Gandhi meeting with the British high command and telling them that it is time for them to leave India. However, some of the protests turn violent and Gandhi goes on a hunger strike until the protests come to a complete end. The Road Back has Gandhi finally achieving his dream of an independent India when the British finally leave.

The final act begins with the Resurrection, and India rises, but all is not well. Hindus are the majority in India and there is fear within the Muslim community that they’ve merely exchanged British oppressors for Hindu ones. The prospect of civil war hangs over everything that Gandhi has accomplished as the separate nations of Pakistan and India are created, but there is little peace as the two cultures clash. What’s great about this story point is that even though the British ruled and oppressed over the Hindus and Muslims, they kept the peace between them, and this creates an interesting dynamic. Is it better to have an uneasy peace at the expense of your freedom, or is freedom worth the violence that it can sometimes cause. The film proposes that question, and answers the latter emphatically. The film ends with the Return with the Elixir, as peace is declared between the two religions, a peace that was brokered by Gandhi going on yet another hunger strike. Gandhi then resolves to go to Pakistan to help secure the peace, but he is gunned down before he can get there.

This is a very strong Hero’s Journey dynamic that helps to move the film along and keep it from feeling as long as it really is.

The other thing that I like about Gandhi from a story telling perspective is that Gandhi is on an internal journey more than anything. It seems on the surface that Gandhi goes through very little growth or change, at least from an internal perspective. He starts out the film peaceful and wise and carries that through to the end. But what happens over the course of the story is that Gandhi grows from oppressed to free. This is both internal and external growth that you might miss entirely, at least consciously, and not even know it. In fact, I missed it initially until thinking about it just now.

I guess that’s where the strength in this film really lies. It’s a film, like so many other Best Picture winners before it, that requires participation on the part of the viewer. It requires you to think about what you’re watching, as well as the ramifications of each event and/or scene in the film. It’s interesting, but after reflecting on it for a little while, I actually like the film better than I did when it ended.

Now is this one of my favorite Best Picture winners? It is not. In fact, I actually feel like this is a film that is less than the sum of its parts. There are a lot of terrific scenes that are engaging and dramatic, but the scope of the story is so broad and sweeping, and the film is so long, that it was difficult for me to become fully engaged. I do like this film, but I don’t love it in its entirety.

One aspect of this film that I did love, however, was the performance of Ben Kingsley. He deservedly won the Oscar for Best Actor over Paul Newman in The Verdict, which is one of Newman’s great, yet underrated roles, and he transformed himself into this seminal figure. Indeed, the role of Gandhi was the signature role for Kingsley and made him a household name. Gandhi was his first major film role, as he had been a fixture on British television previous to that. Gandhi introduced Ben Kingsley to American audiences and made him a star, and he has become one of the most respected actors in the industry. His portrayal of Gandhi is nothing short of masterful, as we watch him age over decades and watch him become the sage guru of an entire population. This was a transcendent performance that really carried the entire film.

Did the Academy get it right?

I will give a reluctant yes to that question; however Gandhi is not my favorite film that was nominated that year. In fact, I would say that I like all but one of the nominees better that Gandhi and I can’t include Missing in that group because I’ve never seen it. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was nominated that year, and I might put Gandhi ahead of it, but there is some really great stuff going on in E.T. It is a film that has tension, emotion, humor, and great (for the day) special effects. The acting isn’t close to Gandhi, but it became the all-time box office leader that year and it’s also rated #25 on the original list of the Top 100 Films of all time by AFI. Gandhi was not on the list. Another terrific film that was nominated that year was the previously mentioned The Verdict starring Paul Newman as a washed up attorney who is trying to get his life and career back on track by taking on an impossible case. As mentioned, Newman is spectacular in it, and any screenwriter who wants to see an instructive film on character arcs should see that film. However, as I’ve said before and I will say again, courtroom dramas don’t win Best Picture. My personal favorite film from 1982, however, is Tootsie. Ranked #62 on AFI’s original Top 100, this is another great film with a tight story and a main character who experiences an exceptional character arc. All that said, I understand why Gandhi won, and I even agree with it to a certain degree. It is an epic film about important things. It’s the type of film that requires a certain amount of thought to really understand it, and it fits the eyeball test as a film that should win Best Picture in a way that the other nominees in 1982 really did not. To me Gandhi is a very good, though not great film that is less than the sum of its parts, and probably not the Best Picture of 1982, but still somehow worthy of winning.