Classic Film!

Rating: Null/10 (7 January 2000)

Spoilers!
First, it was a classic film, which should have won all the awards it did. Second - it could have been better.
Gump is a tall tale, a cliched tour, of America from the 1950s through the 1980s. One man, a slightly retarded individual, named Forrest Gump, from the deep south of course, bumps into and/or is the cause of innumerable public events and incidents, decade after decade; each spiked with appropriate pop background music, from Hendrix to Fleetwood Mac. It's a bit strained to fit as many pop culture references into the life of one man, as with the back to back t-shirt episodes of the running man, Gump. But, generally, it works - except:
Except that as with any tall tale, the how, why, and wherefore is always glossed over. How could he be so utterly unaware of himself and his place in publicized events, year after year? How could he run coast to coast and back again? and is that considered interesting (it's a slow point of the film). It's a joke, here, pathos there. It's a laugh at the Black Panthers - shown as ignorant, tedious and boring demagogues, who lecture a man who, under both enemy and friendly fire saved the life of his best friend, a black man - a laugh at the SDS - shown as basically a trendy, superficial and messed up Bohemian - the March on Washington crowd - 'offing the pigs' while hastily presenting a man who utterly opposes their agenda - the Mr. Goodbar disco set - bunch of licentious druggies, and no more - and so on and so forth. For those whom the anti-war crowd and Mr. Goodbar were heroes, this film must be like a knife in the side. But it's not really anti-liberal, or conservative, so much as it remains a tall tale and a platform for almost sketch comedy, but based on what the writers knew or esteemed, which would seem to be liberal causes mostly - so those are what wind up getting skewered.
The pathos is suggested in Gump as the 'little child' of Scripture - to be as the child, to accept others, to be uncritical, to always believe, and the like. He never holds a grudge. He always want to believe the best of others. He transforms Dan's life, and presents the most emotional moment of the whole film when Dan comes to visit for the wedding, between Gump and his doomed wife, Jenny - and is able to walk on artificial limbs, obviously happy to be alive.
However, Gump isn't really a child. A while his acceptance of others is laudable, the reason is still that of incompetence. He literally doesn't know enough not to be naive. He doesn't have a choice - and it's not a choice he makes, therefore. Add to the fact that his entire life is really a series of screenwriter's jokes. He simply cannot appreciate what he's done, or why. It's all a blur of events which he relates in the most alienated, and disconnected fashion. It's only to contradict the story so far when running man, Gump, remarks on the beauty of a mountain reflecting on a lake below, or the momentary pause from the rain in Vietnam. It's like two different people, but the simple, and gentle man, not really involved in his own life, is the one seen through most of the film. Real people who have mental disabilities, supposedly as Gump, could appreciate the sunset over a lake, and could express a far wider range of emotion than the emotionally stunted Gump. Had they made the simple man more aware of himself, more human, it would have been a much better film upon repeated viewing.
Ultimately, it could be the writers present a message they didn't intend to. Gump is great not just because good things happen to him, even in desperate situations, but because he has not convinced himself, as the boomers around him have in this film, that life is not only not like a box of chocolates, because there must be some planning and goal setting in life, but that life is just one long stumble after another through cheap slogans and debilitating drugs. One stumbles through nature, friends, wealth, awards, and accomplishment. Thinking itself so much smarter, the other just stumbles, and is not even to be pitied for it. It's a message film, to be sure. But the message can get lost in the humorous tall tale, because in that sense, it's almost two films, instead of one.