Film review

  • Forrest Gump

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Robert Zemeckis (1994)

    I’d never seen it before.  My cinema visits weren’t so frequent in the mid-1990s; once Robert Zemeckis’s romantic comedy-drama became a byword for cutely uplifting awards bait, there wasn’t much incentive to watch it on television.  The British TV premiere was on BBC1 on New Year’s Day 1998.  I know that because the writer and broadcaster Frank Muir died suddenly during that night and I recall a newspaper report in which his son-in-law Geoffrey Wheatcroft said that Muir had watched Forrest Gump with his family shortly before going to bed for the final time.  I think this stayed with me because it made me wonder what will be the last film that I see.  I’ve now at last watched this one (on BBC iPlayer, a few days after its latest screening).  I won’t repeat the experience and have already seen three films subsequently.  It’s something of a relief to know I won’t depart this life on Forrest Gump.

    Nor will I read Winston Groom’s 1986 novel of the same name, from which Eric Roth’s screenplay is adapted, though Wikipedia says that Roth changed the source material extensively.  (For both those reasons, I won’t connect any of what follows in this note to Groom’s original.)  In a framing device for the narrative, the slow-witted, open-hearted title character sits on a bench by a bus stop in Savannah, Georgia, initiating conversation with a succession of people who temporarily share the bench with him.  Thirty-something Forrest (Tom Hanks) tells these strangers the story of his life through flashbacks.  Raised by his adoring, determined single mother (Sally Field) in Greenbow, Alabama, the boy Forrest (Michael Conner Humphreys) wears leg braces to correct a spinal curvature.  On his first day at school, he meets a little girl called Jenny Curran (Hanna R Hall) and they immediately become friends.  Other kids give Forrest a hard time because of his physical disability and low intelligence.  On one occasion, he flees a group of bullies, running so fast that his braces break off and his pursuers, even on bikes, can’t catch him.

    The moment the leg braces break off is the first opportunity for Robert Zemeckis to use special visual effects, which will be a major feature of Forrest Gump.  The sequence is also the bridge from the boy to the grown-up hero.  In his late teens (Tom Hanks’s boyishness allows him easily to take over at this point), Forrest is still the target of bullies and Jenny (Robin Wright from now on) is still urging him to run, from contemporaries now in cars.  This time, he runs onto and across a sports field, where his remarkable speed catches the attention of a football coach.  Though Forrest is no scholar, this is enough for him to win a sports scholarship to the University of Alabama, where he’s coached by Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant (Sonny Shroyer).   He’s not the first famous – or about to be famous – name to cross Forrest’s path.  His mother runs a boarding house out of the Gumps’ Greenbow home.  One of her tenants is Elvis Presley (Peter Dobson).  Forrest (still in leg braces at this stage) jerks about as he dances along to Elvis’s guitar music, thus inspiring the latter’s own stage moves – as Forrest and his mother soon discover, in astonishment, from a TV screen in a local shop window.

    It’s soon clear Forrest is going to coincide with key figures and events of the mid-twentieth century, so as to tell not just his own story but (sort of) the story of his American generation.  A combination of his own talents and virtues, and the operation of chance – or, as Forrest sees it, God’s will – means the protagonist, from that football field sprint onwards, repeatedly comes good.  At Alabama University, where he witnesses George Wallace’s notorious ‘stand in the schoolhouse door’, Forrest is selected for the national College Football All-America Team and gets to meet President John F Kennedy at the White House.  After graduation, Forrest enlists in the army and is sent to Vietnam.  When his platoon is ambushed in the Mekong Delta, his good friend Bubba (Mykelti Williamson) is killed but Forrest saves the lives of several comrades, including the platoon lieutenant, Dan Taylor (Gary Sinise).  Forrest is awarded the Medal of Honor and gets a handshake from Lyndon Johnson.  Forrest then develops a flair for table tennis and gets involved in ‘ping-pong diplomacy’:  that leads to a guest spot, alongside John Lennon, on Dick Cavett’s show and a third Oval Office encounter, with Richard Nixon.  When they were doing military training, Forrest agreed to join Bubba in the shrimping business.  He now uses his sporting celebrity to endorse a table-tennis paddle-making company in Alabama and his fee to buy a shrimp boat – the only one in the locality to survive Hurricane Carmen in 1974.  Forrest’s boat makes a commercial killing and the hugely profitable Bubba Gump Shrimp Company is born.

    The unwilled, accidental, inexorable progress of holy fool Forrest calls to mind that of Chance the gardener in Hal Ashby’s Being There (1979).  Forrest’s involvement with epoch-making people and happenings, especially the trick of incorporating him into archive film of these people, evokes Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983).  What’s distinctive about Zemeckis’s whimsical meek-shall-inherit-the-earth story, compared with those other two films, is the lack of irony with which it’s told – a quality reinforced by Alan Silvestri’s soupy-triumphal score.  That music also signals the more familiar sentimental focus that will gradually develop as Forrest’s collisions with history peter out.  In their White House conversation, Nixon asks Forrest where he’s staying in Washington and suggests somewhere better.  You can see what’s coming:  in his new accommodation, Forrest observes and reports the Watergate break-in.  After that, the current affairs stuff is negligible (save for a continuing, odd preoccupation with failed assassination efforts:  the wounding of George Wallace gets as much attention as the killing of the Kennedys and there’s later footage of attempts on the lives of Presidents Ford and Reagan).  Forrest’s financial success, which risks obscuring his spiritual significance, also has to be played down.

    The Watergate joke, occupying barely a minute of screen time, contrasts with protracted descriptions of the post-Vietnam tribulations of Lt Dan.  Bellicose Dan, after losing both legs in the war (more special effects), has turned into a wholly embittered, drugs-and-drink-ridden veteran until Forrest offers him a partnership in the shrimp company that makes them both millionaires.  While he’s still in the lower depths, there’s a scene involving Dan and a couple of prostitutes that seems meant to be emotionally tough and real.   Although unpleasant, it isn’t either of those things but it is an example of how Forrest Gump, every so often, professes gritty substance.  (The first time this happens is when the three cyclist bullies throw stones at and chase the boy Forrest.)  Zemeckis seems to think his film’s largely benign world view will make his illustrations of human cruelty more remarkable.  They are remarkable in the sense of noticeable – but that’s only because of the gulf between them and the highly exaggerated folksy innocence of Forrest, his mother et al.

    Zemeckis and Eric Roth concentrate increasingly on Forrest’s unrequited love life.  He and Jenny keep separating and reuniting.  Sexually abused as a child, Jenny becomes a hippie in the late 1960s:  Forrest catches sight of her at an anti-Vietnam War rally, just as he’s talking with Abbie Hoffman (Richard D’Alessandro) in his stars-and-stripes shirt.  A few years later, as Jenny struggles to recover from drugs addiction, she visits Forrest in Greenbow.  He proposes marriage to her, they make love but she leaves next morning and breaks his heart.  This propels him into more running, in a big way:  Forrest spends the next three years on a cross-country marathon that attracts a lengthening procession of fellow-travellers and considerable media attention.  He eventually decides it’s time to stop running; it’s now also time for the film to break out of its flashback structure into the present tense.  Forrest is sitting on that bench because Jenny, who now lives in Savannah, has written asking him to visit her.  When he gets to her home, he learns they have a son, Forrest Jr (Haley Joel Osment, in his first cinema role).

    In the course of the story, Forrest loses the two women most important to him – first his mother, then Jenny.  Both deaths are hygienic, painless and peaceful, as only Hollywood deaths can be.  Mrs Gump, with an accepting smile, announces that ‘It’s just my time’.  (As he emerges from the memory of her death, Forrest tells his bench-mate that his mother had cancer but you’d never guess it.)  Jenny, after telling Forrest he’s a father, also tells him, ‘I have some kind of virus’.  It’s now the early 1980s:  the thought crosses your mind the virus could be AIDS.  But of course Jenny’s wild days are far behind her now – like Zemeckis’s interest in linking Forrest’s biography to contemporary American headlines.  Jenny and Forrest marry (this time she proposes to him) and return to Greenbow with their little boy.   In the closing sequence, after Jenny’s death, Forrest sees his son onto the same school bus his mother once saw him onto.  It even has the same driver (Siobhan Fallon Hogan) as it did all those years ago.  A small mercy:  there’s no repetition of the clumsily staged joke that accompanied that first-day-of-school departure early in the film, when the bus driver struggles to get Forrest to utter a word because his mother told him not to speak to strangers.  Zemeckis has Mrs Gump standing so close to the bus entrance that she must be able to hear what’s going on.

    Though hardly deserving of the rare second consecutive Best Actor Oscar he won for Forrest Gump (after Philadelphia the previous year), Tom Hanks makes the film less intolerable than it would otherwise be.  A few years ago, he told Graham Norton that he modelled Forrest’s emphatic Southern accent on the natural speaking voice of Michael Conner Humphreys (who’s actually from Mississippi), the boy Forrest.  Although the cloying grandiosity of the piece makes it impossible to enjoy, Hanks’s performance is likeable in making you feel that he devised a characterisation through imagination rather than ‘researching’ people with learning difficulties.  The main supporting performances are adequate.  The smaller parts tend to be gruesomely overplayed, although Michael Conner Humphreys and Haley Joel Osment are honourable exceptions.

    Robert Zemeckis opens with shots of a white feather floating in the sky, where it keeps being caught by the wind.  The feather is delicate but somehow plucky, though at the mercy of nature.  Needless to say, Zemeckis closes with the same image.  Most of what comes in between in Forrest Gump is just as vexing, though not quite everything is the film’s fault:  Zemeckis can’t be blamed for the fact that, at this distance in time, Forrest’s red baseball cap, even without an acronym emblazoned on it, inevitably evokes the MAGA model.  The script’s most famous line (which, in 2011, won a place in the American Film Institute’s top 100 movie quotes of all time) is another matter.   Forrest recalls that ‘Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re gonna get’.  Really?  Either the contents guides to chocolate selections never made it across the Atlantic or this is a rubbish analogy.

    20 December 2020

  • The Prom

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ryan Murphy (2020)

    When their musical biopic of Eleanor Roosevelt (Eleanor!) closes after a single performance, on-the-skids stars Dee Dee Allen (Meryl Streep) and Barry Glickman (James Corden) drown their sorrows in the company of perennial chorus girl Angie Dickinson (Nicole Kidman) and – behind the bar – Trent Oliver (Andrew Rannells), a Juilliard graduate turned resting actor.  Dee Dee and Barry decide they need a cause to reboot their careers and create the entirely misleading impression that they’re interested in someone other than themselves.  Angie learns on Twitter about Emma Nolan (Jo Ellen Pellman), a lesbian teenager in Edgewater, Indiana whose school prom has been cancelled because she wanted to attend with another girl as her partner.  The New York theatre foursome sets off for Edgewater to adopt Emma as their cause and win Hoosier hearts and minds.

    The Prom started life as a stage musical, with music by Matthews Sklar, lyrics by Chad Beguelin and book by Beguelin and Bob Martin.  Originally staged in Atlanta for a few weeks in 2016, it opened on Broadway two years later.  Although it got plenty of critical praise and Tony (etc) nominations, the show didn’t show a profit.  The Prom‘s commercial future looked rosier from the moment that Ryan Murphy, the hugely successful and influential TV showrunner, announced, in April 2019, that he wanted to turn it into a film.  Murphy lost no time making things happen.  Within a matter of weeks, he’d signed up Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, James Corden and others.  The Prom, with a screenplay by Beguelin and Martin, started shooting before the end of the year.

    The result has a few things in common with Mamma Mia!  They’re musicals in which Meryl Streep stars and epitomises the whole cast’s zestful enjoyment of what they’re doing, daft and camp as it mostly is.  Both films are disorienting, though for different reasons.  Whenever a lot of people sang and danced together in Mamma Mia!, the number plunged into organised chaos.  Phyllida Lloyd, a much-respected theatre director, was a film-making novice, and how it showed.  Like her, Ryan Murphy is better known for work in a different medium but has directed two feature films before this one (the poorly-received 2006 adaptation of Augusten Burroughs’s startling, funny memoir Running with Scissors and, four years later, Eat Pray Love, which made plenty of money despite mediocre reviews).  Murphy’s direction isn’t all over the place as Lloyd’s was.  His film’s silliness is far more knowing.  Even so, The Prom is bewildering – it’s hard to keep up with the rapid shifts in tone.

    The opening satire of self-obsessed luvvies is so broad that the first few minutes are like a comedy sketch (an expensively produced one).  You know this can’t be sustained for the length of a feature film, and it isn’t.  The situations and characters in Edgewater are broadly drawn, too, but the film isn’t making fun of Emma’s plight or of the anxieties of Alyssa Greene (Ariana DeBose), her closeted inamorata, whose mother (Kerry Washington) is the robustly narrow-minded chair of Edgewater High School’s PTA.  Emma and Alyssa need help.  Once they and the visitors to Indiana meet, the latter must therefore be a force for good, in spite of their ignobly egocentric motives for descending on the place.  After all, Dee Dee, Barry et al aren’t faking their belief in gay rights, which sets them apart from any of the locals in evidence, except Tom Hawkins (Keegan-Michael Key), the high school’s liberal-minded principal.  With the battle lines drawn, the narrative veers rapidly back and forth between making fun of the main characters and making sure that they carry the day.

    The Prom, improbably, manages to keep this going for over two hours without getting dull – even though a big difference between it and Mamma Mia! is that the songs here, though very numerous, are no great shakes.  The entertainment quotient is thanks mostly to Matthew Libatique’s vivid cinematography and the high-powered cast.  There are no real weaknesses in it although, if The Prom hadn’t already existed, you might suspect the thin role of Angie Dickinson (why does she share her name with a real star of yesteryear?) was invented to give Nicole Kidman something, but not enough, to do.  Meryl Streep, who looks lovely, and James Corden overplay with almost indecent verve.  They complement each other well until the gulf between them in acting range emerges as Murphy turns to the melancholy backstories of Dee Dee and Barry – her unhappy marriage, his tragically isolated formative years (Sam Pillow plays him as a teenager).  Barry is revealed to be a narcissist faute de mieux ­­– because the homophobic culture he grew up in denied him self-respect as a gay man.  In these supposedly touching moments, James Corden is phony as he never is doing the OTT thespian.  (It probably doesn’t help that Tracey Ullman, who briefly appears as the mother who rejected Barry and must now make belated amends, gives the impression of having walked into the film straight from her quick-fire impressions TV show.)  For Meryl Streep, in contrast, the temporary switches into but-seriously mode are effortless.  Neither side of Dee Dee is any kind of stretch for Streep, though she gets a good physical workout in the role.

    Jo Ellen Perlman is very likeable as Emma but the most striking character in Edgewater – in the whole film, in fact – is Principal Hawkins.  That’s partly because Keegan-Michael Key is relatively, and appealingly, low-key; partly because of what the concoction he’s playing says about The Prom’s mechanics.  Dee Dee immediately likes the look of Tom Hawkins; he immediately tells her he’s a super-fan – of musical theatre and her especially (he’s made repeated trips to New York to see her Broadway shows).  Although she’s pleased with the adoration, Dee Dee is also disappointed:  she assumes the good-looking, unmarried Tom, since he knows all her big show numbers backwards, must be gay.  As the role is written, he might just as well be – except that he’s not (by the end of the film, he and Dee Dee are an item).  Don’t ask either how this modern, enlightened man came to be appointed high-school principal in a town like Edgewater.

    Because its name signals Backwater, I assumed Edgewater was a made-up place but a quick look online tells me it really exists.  You’re bound to wonder what its residents think of The Prom‘s characterisation of their culture, especially since Emma’s story is inspired by an actual controversy ten years ago at a Mississippi high school.  (Ryan Murphy was born and raised in Indianapolis but that doesn’t explain the choice of setting: it’s the same in the original stage show, whose authors aren’t from Indiana.)  It’s remarkable, however, that the film keeps the locals who appear on screen to a minimum.  Alyssa’s mother and four dreary straight teenagers, who verbally abuse Emma and blame her for the prom’s cancellation, all see the light in due course.  Benighted Hoosiers are otherwise conspicuous by their absence from the film – most conspicuously at the climactic rearranged prom, which appears to draw LGBTQ+ youngsters from across the country.  

    Peter Bradshaw concludes his enthusiastic review in the Guardian as follows:

    ‘Of course there is no question of the music-theatre megastars seriously conceding anything to conservative-minded locals, other than the time-honoured virtue of putting aside your self-love for a bit.  But self-love is the whole point.’

    True enough and Ryan Murphy does illustrate different kinds of self-love, ranging from Emma and Alyssa’s proper self-esteem to Dee Dee and Barry’s extravagant ego-tripping, which is improper but supposedly irresistible.  There’s a smug hypocrisy behind this apparent generosity, though:  Murphy, Chad Beguelin and Bob Martin are predictably selective about the contexts in which self-approval is a virtue and/or a hoot.  It’s OK when it reflects the ethos of liberal-minded Broadway, not OK in small-town Indiana – except where it opposes the status quo.  Muffling its own prejudices, The Prom is as blinkered as it’s right on.  This can’t have been the film’s intention but it ended up reminding me there’s no one more self-loving than Donald Trump.

    17 December 2020

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