Surprisingly enjoyable

Rating: 7/10 (26 March 2001)

There's something of a tradition in fiction of using the idiot savant to hold the mirror up to society and reflect its foibles. The figure of the Good Soldier Schweik was one I remember being introduced to in my early years at university. Forrest Gump is also a soldier for much of this picture's duration, but the satire is diluted to no more than a few bum and fart jokes in the presence of the great and the good.
Maybe it's this evasiveness that caused this film to attract such a storm of criticism from the Left when it first appeared. Seven years on, it's hard to see the film's reluctance to take on biting social satire as something it deserved to be damned for. More likely, it's the film's unflattering portrayal of the counter culture of the sixties that made its baby boomer critics touchy. For the most part, it's a gentle and appealingly whimsical picture. Australian - and more particularly, Melbourne - viewers will recognize in it something of the spirit of Michael Leunig's cartoons. In keeping with this spirit is the one aspect of this film that could be regarded as controversial, which is its scepticism toward causes.

Tom Hanks is excellent. It says something about the rest of the world's stereotypes about American culture that one of America's biggest movie stars can hold the screen for hour after hour while remaining the most self-effacing of actors. There is charm and real emotion in his performance. If the film sometimes veers into sentimentality (and it does) it is not Hanks' fault.
The film isn't a masterpiece. As I say, it does sometimes lapse into sentimentality, and it annoys me that, like Rain Man, it can't acknowledge disability without conferring on its disabled characters superhuman talents of one kind or another. And, as I'm sure others have pointed out, the trick shots involving Gump's encounters with various historical personages had already been done - to much sharper comic effect - by Woody Allen in Zelig. However, for me the film's greatest specific failing is that it doesn't do more with the character of Gump's love, Jenny, who doesn't do much more in this film than turn up every half hour or so and look beautiful. I thought there was scope there to explore the nature of their mutual dependence more deeply, and to illuminate both characters in the process. To some extent this does happen with the character of Lieutenant Dan, a nicely drawn character who provides the right sort of counterweight to Gump.
I don't expect that I will want to see this film again and again, the way I keep going back to Leunig's cartoons, which have a kind of natural wisdom-in-innocence that Zemeckis' film sometimes visibly strains to achieve. It's not a film that particularly goes anywhere, not that it really means to. But, a little to my surprise, I did enjoy watching it.