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
