Life is Like a Box of Chocolates That You Totally Just Got for Free

Rating: 7/10 (19 February 2019)

"Forrest Gump" is a classic movie that everyone's seen a dozen times, and if you haven't you probably know all the quotes: You've heard "Run, Forrest, run" and "Life is like a box of chocolates" and so on, and you've heard impressions of Tom Hanks's slow Southern drawl in varying degrees of similitude and awfulness. The movie ambles charmingly along with its protagonist, following him from Alabama to Vietnam to a Louisiana shrimp boat, watching him meet presidents and celebrities, and regularly churning out life lessons. A charming, amiable sort of movie, if only those life lessons weren't so sickening.
Forrest never does much of anything, but wonderful things just keep happening to him. His miraculous sprinting earns him a college football scholarship, and he meets John Kennedy after the championship game. He joins the army and goes off to the Vietnam War, where he wins the Medal of Honor. He becomes a wealthy shrimp-boat captain after surviving a hurricane, also rather miraculously. Everything just keeps getting better for him.
Meanwhile, his single mother is stricken with cancer, and dies. His childhood friend Jenny, after struggling with drugs, gets AIDS and dies. His army friend Bubba is killed in Vietnam. His other friend, Lieutenant Dan, gets off easy by comparison, only losing his legs and spending much of the film in a wheelchair.
The obvious and unequivocal message of all this is that it was good to be a straight white man in America in the second half of the twentieth century. The movie's two women both live hard lives and die young, as does Bubba, who is black. Lieutenant Dan is white, by the way.
Forrest is oblivious to nearly everything. Good things are handed to him, like that box of chocolates or the Apple stock he just happened to come by. He even accidentally inspires the iconic yellow smiley face.
Looking at it this way, it's less of a nostalgic trip down our collective memory lane and more of a scathing satire on the inequities of American society. Someone should tell the folks who keep posting this on their "Best Conservative Movies" lists.