Nostalgia and fairy tale

Rating: 8/10 (23 January 2018)

This film is admirable because of the actor who is playing the part of a "dummy," an "idiot," a "mentally handicapped person." Tom Hanks is so natural in his acting that he really looks the part.
Apart from that the film is the most typical American dream fairy tale you can imagine, though often going against politically correct ideas, like the mother (and there is no father) going into fornication with the principal of the school of the town in order to have her son registered in a "normal" school instead of a "special" school, though he is just a couple of points under the minimum IQ required.
The miracle of his running performance is just what it is a fairy tale miracle that makes him, after having been a "spastics" child for years a champion runner one afternoon to escape bullies on bicycles and later on again the same bullies, but who care who they are, this time in an automobile vehicle, in fact a pick-up truck. Good boy indeed. He will become a football champion. He will go to college on a sports scholarship, will make a career there and get a degree. He will enlist in the army straight away and will go to Vietnam where he will, thanks to his limited intellect and his running capability, save four or five wounded GIs just before they are levelled into the soil by a friendly bombing of the area where they got wounded. He will get a congressional Medal of Honor for this fact. He will get wounded in the bottom and as such will be sent to a hospital where he will learn how to become the best ping-pong player ever, a skill that is just physical and in no way intellectual.
After being discharged he will hold his promise to Baba, his best black friend in the army who unluckily got killed in Vietnam and he will start a shrimp fishing business with the money some ping pong racket producer paid him in order to use his name and picture to promote their products. His old lieutenant from Vietnam, whose life he saved on the day when he saved four or five GIs, one of them being his lieutenant, kept his word too and became his partner, though he was legless. A storm destroys the shrimp fishing industry in Alabama and Forrest Gump's ship is the only one to survive the storm. As such now, without any competition, he starts booming. His partner invests the money intelligently, in some apple business, and they both become millionaires. Forrest Gump can retire or so from active life since he gets a very wealthy and comfortable income that counts in millions every year.
He can do what he wants and thus he runs around the USA, across and across again for more than three years when he is summoned by his old school girlfriend Jenny in some place somewhere in fairy land. He had had one and only sexual episode of intercourse some time before she left him again several years ago, one more time going away, one more time abandoning him, one more time departure for hippy life or whatever marginal adventure of drugs, alcohol and promiscuity. She introduces him to her being sick, in fact dying within months, and to his son, Forrest Junior who is about five and is not mentally or intellectually challenged. He takes them home and he buries her as soon as she dies. He then assumes the new role of his life, in his life, the role of father.
I told you it was a fairy tale.
Of course it is highly improbable a mentally and intellectually limited person can do all that and succeed so well, except if you consider you have to be mentally and intellectually challenged to be successful in American capitalism. But dreaming is a good thing. Dreaming that the President of the USA is intellectually challenged. That would be a good idea right now in 2018. Dreaming that this American society is managed by a capitalist system that is itself managed by such luminaries of imbecility. No future indeed. Dreaming that all American wars will be defeats and will end in some soft inhumanity. There you can dream over and over again: that is not going to happen. All American defeats will be in pain and blood, both foreign blood, mostly, and American blood, especially the blood of drones.
But well, it is a nostalgic trip to those days of the 1950s and an allusion to the integration of the school and university system; the 1960s with Black Panthers and some allusion to Woodstock; the 1970s and some allusion to the Watergate Scandal; and the early 1980s and some allusion to the assassination attempt against Reagan echoing the successful assassinations against J.F. Kennedy and his "little brother," though Martin Luther King's assassination is not alluded to. Memory and Nostalgia Lane is still the yellow brick road of some other older fairy tale.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU