The Holy Fool

Rating: 7/10 (13 July 2009)

"Forrest Gump" was the "big film" of 1994, being both a huge commercial success and the winner of six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director for Robert Zemeckis and Best Actor for Tom Hanks. It tells the story of a man and his journey through life, and is told using a framework device in which the title character narrates his life-story to a succession of people seated next to him at a bus stop.
Forrest is a young man from Alabama, probably born some time during the 1940s, although the timeline is rather confusing. He suffers from what would today be described as "learning difficulties", although his athletic abilities win him a place in college on a football scholarship. The film follows him though his college days and his time in the Army during the Vietnam War, where he is awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroism in saving the lives of several members of his platoon.
After leaving the Army, Forrest becomes a leading ping-pong player, playing against Chinese teams in "ping-pong diplomacy". (The sport is always referred to as "ping-pong" in the film, even though its players normally prefer "table-tennis"). He then goes into the shrimping business and, more by luck than judgement, ends up making a fortune, becoming head of the "Bubba Gump Shrimp Company", named after himself and an Army friend killed in the war. (In a curious example of reality imitating fiction, there now actually is a seafood restaurant chain of that name). On a whim, Forrest decides to go for a run, and ends up running for three and a half years, crossing America from coast to coast several times during that period.
A feature of the film is its hero's meetings with the great and the good; he gets to meet three Presidents (Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon) and other celebrities such as Elvis Presley and John Lennon. These scenes were achieved not by using actors but rather by using special effects to insert images of Tom Hanks into old television and newsreel footage. One of its Oscars was for Best Visual Effects. Such effects seem to be a common feature of Zemeckis' films; others such as "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?", "Death Becomes Her" and "What Lies Beneath" are also notable for creative use of CGI.
Contrasting with Forrest's story is that of the great love of his life, his childhood sweetheart Jenny. Whereas he leads an essentially conservative lifestyle, she embraces the counterculture of the sixties, all radical politics, drugs and promiscuous sex. Eventually she marries Forrest while suffering from a mysterious virus (presumed to be HIV, but never named in the film as such), and dies shortly afterwards.
This contrast has led to political controversy and to allegations that the film promotes conservative values. The conservative simpleton prospers, whereas the left-wing intellectual does not. The wages of radicalism are death. Certainly, the film takes the standard liberal line on issues such as racial integration and the Vietnam war, but by 1994 these issues lay two decades in the past. Culturally, its politics are much more conservative. Hanks's dictum that "the film is non-political and thus non-judgemental" has never convinced me. There is, for example, a lot of satire at the expense of the perceived hypocrisies of the hippie movement, such as Jenny's boyfriend who is against violence in Vietnam but not in his private life, regularly beating her up.
"Forrest Gump" was one of the films in which Hanks, seen in the eighties primarily as a comedy star, managed to reinvent himself as a serious actor in the nineties, and brought him his the second of his two successive "Best Actor" Oscars. He is certainly good here, much better than he was in, say, "The Bonfire of the Vanities" or "A League of Their Own", two earlier films in which he had tried to take on more serious roles. He plays Forrest as a sort of holy fool, a man whose simplicity allows his inner goodness and decency to shine through. The character became something of a cult hero, and some of his nuggets of cracker-barrel philosophy, such as "Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get" have passed into popular culture. (In fact, most chocolate manufacturers provide a guide to their selections, so you always know exactly what you're gonna get, but we'll let that pass).
The film itself is a reasonably good one, even if its morality as sometimes rather simplistic, using Forrest's holy fool persona as a means of commenting on the politics and culture of late 20th century America. Zemeckis manages the difficult feat of pulling off a delicate balancing act between comedy and tragedy without the resulting mixture ever seeming incongruous. Yet I have never regarded it as the best film of 1994, being merely a good film in a year which saw a number of very good, even great, ones such as "The Shawshank Redemption", "Four Weddings and a Funeral", "The Madness of King George", "La Reine Margot" and "Nell" (which would have been my personal choice for "Best Picture"). Hanks' performance is good, but not as good as Nigel Hawthorne's in "King George". I suspect that the film's immense success may have been due less to its merits than to the way in which its perceived conservatism fitted the public mood in 1994, the year of the so-called Republican Revolution which saw the Republicans take control of both Houses of Congress. 7/10