Forrest Gump (1994) Review
6/10
A man sits at a bus stop in Savannah with a box of chocolates and tells his life to whoever is sitting there. He was in Vietnam, met three presidents, started a shrimp company, ran across America twice, and has been in love with the same woman since childhood.
The 6 is for a film whose craft is not in dispute and whose argument is. Hanks is superb, the compositing was genuinely new, the structure is clean, and the film’s position on the period it covers is the thing nobody has stopped discussing since 1994.
What makes it worth careful treatment is that the standard objection is partly right and is usually stated badly.
Winston Groom’s novel is also considerably stranger and less sentimental, with Forrest as an astronaut, a wrestler and a chess player, and the adaptation removed the absurdity and kept the passivity, which is where the film’s politics came from and is a clean demonstration of how an adaptation can invert the meaning of a source by subtraction alone, without needing to add a single new idea.
Groom also received none of the profit participation he believed he was owed and said so publicly for years, which is a footnote about accounting instead of about craft and belongs in the record anyway.
Hanks
He won his second consecutive Best Actor for it and the performance is the film’s least contested element.
What he does is refuse sentiment. Forrest is not knowing, is not secretly wise, and does not deliver his lines with any awareness that they are profound, which is the decision the whole film depends on.
The register is specific and consistent. A slight delay before answering, a literal reading of every question, an absence of irony, and a physical stillness that makes the running sequences land when they arrive.
The running sequences are also built on that register. He is asked why he is running, has no answer, and the film lets a national phenomenon form around a man who is simply not stopping, which is the picture’s one genuinely funny idea.
The best scene is the graveside monologue to Jenny, which is the one time the film lets him be articulate, and Hanks plays it as a man who has been assembling those sentences for a long time and is finally somewhere he can say them.
Hanks was also the second actor to win consecutive Best Actor awards, after Spencer Tracy, and the second win is the one people question. The first was Philadelphia, which also appears on this page.
A character who says profound-sounding things must not know they sound profound. The moment the performance or the prose signals awareness, the line becomes an authorial aphorism. Hanks delivers every one of them as a literal answer to a question, which is why they function.
Give the inarticulate character one articulate scene and place it late. The graveside monologue works because the film has denied it for two hours.
A consistent register across a long performance is worth more than variety. The slight delay before answering is present in every scene.
The Technical Work
The archival compositing won Visual Effects and was a genuine advance. Hanks placed into footage of Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, with dialogue constructed from lip reading and re-animation.
The other invisible work is more impressive. Gary Sinise’s legs were removed digitally across a large number of shots, which was new at that scale, and the feather sequence at the opening and close was a digital element in an era when that was difficult.
Sinise’s performance is also the film’s best after Hanks and is rarely discussed. Dan is furious about being alive, states it plainly, and the character’s recovery is the one arc in the film that is earned instead of asserted.
What the effects are for is the film’s real argument. Forrest is inserted into the historical record repeatedly, which is a formal statement that the period’s events happened to somebody who was not paying attention.
Don Burgess shot it and the visual approach is warm and slightly golden throughout, including the Vietnam material, which is the choice a great many people object to and is entirely deliberate.
The Vietnam material is also the film’s most technically careful. The ambush sequence is staged with genuine confusion, Forrest does not understand what is happening, and the film declines to give the audience a tactical overview it withholds from him.
The Objection, Stated Properly
The standard complaint is that the film is conservative, and put that way it is too vague to argue with.
The specific structure is this. Forrest is passive, obedient and incurious, and every good thing happens to him. Jenny is curious, political, seeks out the counterculture, and is punished with abuse, addiction and an early death. The film does not state a moral and the structure delivers one.
Bubba is the other place the arrangement is visible. He has a plan, states it repeatedly, dies, and Forrest executes the plan and becomes wealthy, and the film presents the inheritance of somebody else’s idea as loyalty.
That is the objection and it is a structural observation instead of a political one. Two characters, two dispositions, two outcomes, and the arrangement is legible to anybody watching regardless of what the film intended.
The defense is also real. Jenny’s fate is traceable to her father’s abuse and not to her politics, the film is explicit about that, and the punishment reading requires the viewer to connect things the film keeps separate. Both of those are true, and the structure still says what it says, because a reader receives an arrangement before they receive an explanation.
Structure delivers a moral whether you write one or not. Two characters with opposite dispositions and opposite outcomes is an argument, and no amount of intention changes what the arrangement says. This is the same principle as the ending of Looking for Mr. Goodbar elsewhere on this site. Sequence and pattern are read as causality.
The test is to describe your plot to somebody in three sentences without the explanations. What they hear is what you wrote.
If your defense requires the reader to have kept two things separate that the plot placed together, the defense will not work at scale.
Robin Wright
Jenny is the film’s hardest part and Wright was not nominated, which is the most defensible complaint about the film’s awards result.
The character is required to be sympathetic, to make a series of self-destructive decisions the film does not explain at the time, and to carry the abuse history almost entirely in physical performance.
The scene that establishes it is wordless. She takes Forrest to the house she grew up in, stands in front of it, and begins throwing stones at it until she cannot, and the film does not have anybody explain anything.
Her death is also handled without naming what she dies of, which was a specific 1994 decision. The film gestures at a virus, declines to say the word, and the omission is legible now in a way it was not then.
What the film does not give her is a single scene of her own. Jenny appears when Forrest encounters her, disappears for years at a time, and her life happens offscreen, which is the same structural fault Driving Miss Daisy has with Hoke.
Sally Field is the other performance worth naming and she was thirty-eight playing Hanks’s mother at thirty-eight. The part is a series of aphorisms and she delivers them as a woman who has decided that her son will not be told he is limited.
1994
Best Picture went to this. The other nominees were Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, Quiz Show and Four Weddings and a Funeral.
That is one of the three strongest Best Picture fields in the Academy’s history and the winner is the least interesting film on the list, which is the argument.
The mechanism is not mysterious. This film took around six hundred and eighty million dollars, was a cultural event, and is warm and reassuring about a period the audience had lived through. Pulp Fiction is formally radical and morally indifferent, and Shawshank had not yet become what it became, having underperformed theatrically and found its audience on television afterward.
It also won six awards including Picture, Director, Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Editing and Visual Effects, which is a sweep instead of a split, and that is unusual for an entry on this page.
What is worth stating is that the result has aged in a specific direction. Pulp Fiction’s influence is measurable in thirty years of film, Shawshank is consistently voted the most popular film ever made, and this one is now primarily a subject of argument.
A work that is reassuring about a difficult period will outperform one that is not, immediately, and will lose the long argument. That is the trade and both halves are real. The reassuring version is read by more people and the difficult one is still being discussed.
Zemeckis has never made anything as successful since and has spent much of the intervening thirty years on motion capture and digital experiments, which is its own kind of answer about what he was interested in here.
Watch what happens to a film that finds its audience later. Shawshank underperformed and is now the most popular film ever made, which means release-window performance is close to meaningless.
A strong field damages the winner. Being the least interesting film on a list of five good ones is worse for a reputation than winning in a weak year.1994 also produced Hoop Dreams, Ed Wood, The Lion King, Three Colors Red and Heavenly Creatures, none of which was nominated for Best Picture, which makes the field even stronger than the list of five suggests.
Should you watch Forrest Gump?
Yes, and understand what you are watching. A genuinely great performance that never signals its own profundity, compositing that was new and is still effective, one wordless scene of a woman throwing stones at her father’s house, and a structure that delivers a moral the screenplay never wrote.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on one of my film lists