Sugar-coated Trojan horse

Rating: 1/10 (23 June 1999)

This movie uses all the sappy, sentimental tricks in the book to sucker the audience into believing in poor, disadvantaged Forrest Gump: the sick mother, the bad legs, the innocence of incomplete mental capacity, the bullies, the girlfriend, etc.
If that's as far as it went, however, I wouldn't be writing this. The dangerous thing about this movie is its sweeping generalizations and stereotypical portrayals of events, groups, and people in recent American history. Because the filmmakers have succeeded in getting the viewer to pull so strongly for Gump, they can then pass off their revisionist version of the past few decades with little objection from the viewer.
Yes, it's just a movie, but images like these shape the way people think. The anti-war movement in the sixties and seventies and the Black Panthers, for example, were much more complex than portrayed in this movie. Using tiny, value-charged episodes to paint with such broad brush strokes, in settings that are designed to pull the viewer to Gump's side, is deceptive and manipulative.