One of the greatest lies Hollywood sells and we all buy is that, basically, everything's going to be JUST FINE, when history rather strongly suggests otherwise. It's this kind of cloth-eyed optimism that informs Robert Zemeckis's 1994 Oscar snaffler, but the box of chocolates it promises brings only poison.
Righteously spoofed by Tropic Thunder's Simple Jack (“You m-m-m-mmm-m-make me happy...”), Hanks plays the charming man-child who blunders his way through the biggest events of the 20th century and bores the shit of people at bus-stops. Though he beat The Shawshank Redemption's Morgan Freeman to the 1994 Best Actor Oscar, Hanks' performance is no more nuanced than Cletus the slack-jawed yokel, who debuted on The Simpsons six months earlier.
While the film feigns compassion for Forrest (he has an IQ of 75 and, to begin with, calipers on his legs), it still spends a lot of time laughing at him, having him fall over for comic effect, run away from local bullies to the strains of hillbilly chase music, and get shot in the “but-tocks” in Vietnam. When the film isn't mocking its afflicted hero, it sends him on a series of adventures so picaresque they look like what they are: bullshit wish fulfilment.
Whether teaching Elvis to dance, being paraded in front of various doomed presidents (“I gotta go pee,” he tells JFK), or inspiring John Lennon to write the lyrics to "Imagine" (which explains a lot), Gump sees all – and nothing – but keeps on trucking, turning some of the darkest moments of American history (Little Rock, Vietnam, Watergate) into comic vignettes. But history viewed through the eyes of an idiot isn't cute or revealing, just idiotic.
One thing you probably don't remember about the film is how deeply, deeply wrong it is. An early scene, played for laughs, shows Forrest listening to his Mom (Sally Fields) shagging his headmaster so he won't get sent to special school. And throughout the treatment of Forrest's love Jenny (Robin Wright) is problematic to say the least. Abused by her father as a child, Jenny grows into a troubled young woman, but her suffering is only seen through Forrest's fair-weather filter. “He was a very loving man,” says Forrest of Jenny's dad, “always kissing and touching her and her sisters.”
One scene, borrowed from Zemeckis' own (infinitely superior) Back To The Future, has Gump beating up one of Jenny's lovers in a carpark. After telling him off, she takes him to her dorm, removes her top and asks, “Have you ever been with a girl, Forrest?” Though clearly petrified, he ejaculates, to which she quips: “I bet that never happened in home economics.” Then comes the creepiest of punchlines: her roomate can hear everything. You can only imagine the LOLs they had the morning after.
A classic mother-madonna-whore figure, Jenny ultimately brings Forrest redemption by shagging him, siring him a son who's clever (and Haley Joel Osment) and then, conveniently for fans of films that end, dying. But then shit - as Forrest's mom definitely didn't used to say - happens.
