Rather than focus on specific historical nitpicks, the real problem with the Gandhi biopic is two-fold. One problem of the film has is that there is a vast disjuncture between Gandhi the historical figures versus the popular mythology that has built around him. The 1982 biopic is a reflection of this latter aspect of Gandhi's image. The film presents Gandhi and his world in starkly Manichean of light versus dark. Note that Kingsley's performance (almost universally praised among critics) is one that highlights Gandhi's stoic and moral gravitas and thus accentuates this duality. Many of the other historical characters in the film shrink compared to him. Nehru, for example, is often in awe of Gandhi in the film, and Jinnah is almost a villain in an ill-fitting suit.

The reality of course is that Gandhi inhabited an incredibly complex political and moral world. The film stakes out a position that Gandhi's moral positions become the logical solution to the complex problems of both independence and post-independence India. Such a portrayal not only sidesteps the issue of their effectiveness, but also denudes Gandhi of his own political strategy and agency. Gandhi in the film seeks moral solutions because they are a reflection of his transcendent goodness, not as deliberate choices made by a conscious political actor. Moreover, when these moral stratagems fail, the film does not fault Gandhi, but rather the larger moral failings of Indians, and, by extension, the wider world. This is clear in the film's staging of Gandhi's assassination which is an event drained of almost all context. His assassin is a near cipher whose motivations are unclear and Attenborough frames this moment in history as humanity's rejection of this transcendent saint.

The second major failing of the film is its supporting cast and characters. In a touching scene with Charles Freer Andrews, Kingsley's Gandhi tells his white Christian friend that the struggle for Indian independence is not Andrews's fight and has to be one fought by Indians. Unfortunately, Attenborough did not really have the wherewithal to follow through on this conviction. The film interprets Gandhi's subsequent actions like the Salt March through the eyes of white characters. Whether Candice Bergen's Margaret Bourke-White or John Gieguld's Lord Irwin, it is white people who seem to be the most impacted by Gandhi's message and moral force. As one Indian critic of the film put it, it is unclear in the movie if Gandhi had any Indian friends or colleagues. Indians exist in the film as either obstacles for Gandhi or vessels which receive his wisdom. They have little in the way of a narrative arc like some of the white characters.

Jewaharlal Nehru actually advised Richard Attenborough not to deify Gandhi, as "that is what we have done in India and he was to great a man to be deified." Although Attenborough claimed to follow Nehru's advice, Gandhi has fallen into the trap of many biopics by oversimplifying its subject and the context of the times. While the above criticisms are aesthetic ones, they compound to form a very problematic interpretation of Indian history that reduced the bulk of Indians into extras in an important part of their own history. Indian independence was more than one saintly Indian man and a coterie of white people and some Indians reacting to him.