Imagine it's 1982 and you're rooting for Tootsie to win the Academy Award for best picture. You have no hope. Why? Because the competition, Richard Attenborough's Gandhi, embodies the hopes and dreams of hundreds of millions of impoverished Indians. You think I'm making this up? During the ceremony, Attenborough actually accepted that particular statuette on behalf of "Mahatma Gandhi himself" and, more cloying still, "his plea to all of us to live in peace." What message was the academy supposed to send the world? "Congratulations on that freedom struggle, India, but what can we say? Dustin Hoffman looks great in a dress!" So, while I'm sure the film richly deserved (cough) its eight Oscars, the producers did have an ace up their sleeve: the pity vote.I can't really quite share Salam's assessment of the movie's merits, but his piece is worth a read. My other reason for posting is that I suspect Scott hates Gandhi and I'm trying to bait him into saying so.But now that Columbia Pictures has released a special 25th�anniversary-edition DVD -- and now that India is no longer the sick man of Asia -- the time has come for a cold-eyed assessment of the 191-minute monster. To be honest, when I first set out to write this essay, I figured, "I'll keep it real and drop bombs on Gandhi." But watching the film again, I was struck by how much of it I remembered vividly. It's difficult to overstate Gandhi's impact on my life and on the world. Even now, veterans of the anti-apartheid movement praise the movie as an inspiration, and high-minded do-gooders have dubbed an Arabic version for screening across the West Bank. While Gandhi isn't about to bring peace to the Middle East, it's actually a pretty great movie.
--Sam Rosenfeld
