Forrest Gump (1994)

reviewed by
Serdar Yegulalp

Forrest Gump (1994)
A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp
(C) 1997 by Serdar Yegulalp

CAPSULE: A cultural landmark despite its many flaws, GUMP is at the very least unique.

Many movies are about people who are unintentionally depicted as stupid, and are therefore boring to watch. FORREST GUMP is about a man who is not intelligent, but is never boring to watch, because the way he reacts to his improbably dreamlike existence is the very substance of this unique but troubled movie.

The very oddest thing about FORREST GUMP is how some parts of it work so well and come so naturally, and how other parts of it are at such odds with the rest of the film. I wondered how no one making the movie could sense the inherent schizophrenia. And yet, as a whole, the movie works in ways that defy description. It's vastly overrated, but it's still worth seeing.

Forrest is played with the grace of a tightrope walker by Tom Hanks. He (Gump) is mildly retarded; he has an IQ of 75 at the movie's start and stays pretty much on that level all the way through. His trove of facts increases, but his basic methodology of handling the world never changes. As a boy, with braces on his legs, he peers at life and expects little more than to be heard and acknowledged, and the first person aside from his doting mother to do that with him is his lifelong love, Jenny (played glowingly by Robin Wright, of THE PRINCESS BRIDE).

Then one day the braces come off -- more or less by accident -- and Forrest discovers he can run like hell. He couples that with advice from Jenny -- that the best thing to do when you're in trouble is just run -- and this becomes the big asset that gets him through college on a football scholarship. And the one thing that gets him through Vietnam, allowing him to save most of his platoon and receive the Congressional Medal of Honor*. Although he rescues his platoon leader (Gary Sinise), the man has nothing but rancor and bitterness, since he lost his legs, while Gump only got shot in the rear (in a development which starts funny and then gets tiresome).

Good luck rains down on Gump the way bad luck rains down on the rest of us. He goes on to be the captain of a shrimp boat, a Ping-Pong champion (clobbering the Chinese in the process), a millionaire, a cross-country runner. The sly thing about the movie is the way he just sort of backs into everything, doing what comes naturally, and is even happy when nothing happens. All he wants out of life is the love of a woman, even though she's a damaged and desperate person who frantically avoids real love out of the fear that she will just bring a person that's better than her down.

Too much of any one thing in Hanks' performance would have sent the whole thing crashing down. The balance is almost unbelieveable: it's no wonder he won an Oscar for this role. He plays a man who is, quite simply, dumb -- but not uninteresting. He understands just enough about evil to know that it's something to be avoided, and leaves the analysis to someone else. He asks himself a question at the end of the movie -- do we have a destiny, or are we just playthings of destiny? -- and based on everything he's seen, he's convinced the answer is a little of both.

The movie throws this into sharp relief with Sinise's character -- a man who has been screwed badly, but eventually finds a kind of peace with himself, when he realizes he wanted to die nobly but on false pretenses.

There are two big trends in the movie that work against it. One is the nonstop running gag about Forrest's dumb luck, which is milked in some scenes that are charming and other scenes that are not. Another is the way he's consistently involved with high-profile historical figures in ways that are totally peripheral and only used to make shallow historical pointers. (The scene where he "accidentally" spills the beans on the Watergate break-in, for instance.) After a while, I started questioning the wisdom of this whole strategy: What was the real point, story-wise, of having him intersect with such high-profile fate? To further throw his attitude about life into sharp relief? It only makes us conscious of how the screenwriter (Eric Roth) is employing the whole thing as a manipulative gimmick.

This attitude extends into other areas of the movie. In another scene, Forrest, still in his Army outfit, winds up at a peace rally, and when asked to speak about the war, the PA malfunctions and all we see is his mouth moving. The scene serves ultimately only to reconnect him with Jenny, so it's another irritating throwaway. I, for one, would have loved to hear what he had to say. The way the script sabotages its own development through scenes like this is annoying; it makes the Gump character into a gimmick, not a person.

There's also a tendency throughout the movie to paint people that have more discrimination and analysis than Forrest in their blood as buffoons: a scene in a Black Panther cell, for instance, or a scene where he's mobbed by reporters and hangers-on when running cross-country. Gump isn't morally superior to these people (how could he be?), just differently motivated, and to try and make them look like fools is itself foolish. It's a troubling sign that the filmmakers themselves didn't quite understand what they were doing, that they hadn't quite taken the extra step in making the film more than just the sum of its ingredients.

And yet, what an unmistakeably different movie this is, and at times, a very moving one. The best moments are the simplest: The ice cream in the bedpan. The ping-pong matches. Or when Forrest finds Jenny as a stripper, or when he has his son introduced to him for the first time. I am reminded strongly of BEING THERE, the mind-blowing film in which Peter Sellers played a simpleminded man whose entire outlook on life has been formed by television, and how his attitude is misperceived by everyone who comes into contact with him. BEING THERE was far wickeder and knowing that GUMP, and contained a final shot that even today people still have heated arguments about. GUMP never quite has a moment like that, sadly.

Two and a half out of four feathers.

* A friend of mine, who was in the service, commented that Sinise's character would have been required to put in a recommendation in order for Gump to win the medal. I decided that the movie wasn't ultimately interested in the factual details of his life, but it did irk me.

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