Forrest Gump. - movie reviews

TODAY'S favorite movie heroes are the man who knows everything and the man who knows nothing. The one who knows everything is not threatening because he is so obviously a fabrication, a fiction on which our fond fantasies can hitch a ride. The one who knows nothing, the holy fool, is even better: we can all feel superior to him as he stumbles on to luck, love, and riches despite his mental deficiency, merely because he is sweet and good. Well, says the average moviegoer, I am not only as decent as this simpleton, but also a lot smarter. Good things must be just around the corner.

This week we have prime specimens of both these lies. The eponymous hero of Forrest Gump is a youngish Southerner sitting on a public bench in Savannah, telling a series of more or less interested benchmates his life story. He is the Little Man who was practically everywhere any kind of history was made--as an innocent bystander, unsuspecting initiator of great events, or heroic but unsung participant. I won't go into details, but Watergate, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Sino-American relations, even a corner of the Vietnam War wouldn't have been the same but for Gump, the retardate as philosopher king. "Stupid is as stupid does," he retorts to those who would put him down, and because, however uncomprehendingly, he manages invariably to do the right thing, affliction emerges as an invaluable asset.

Robert Zemeckis's film, with a script by Eric Roth (who also wrote the maudlin Mr. Jones), is based on a novel by Winston Groom, which I take to be a belated offshoot of the Southern Gothic tradition as practiced by innumerable writers, high and low. It is a genre partaking of such antithetical ingredients as near-surreal absurdism and minutely scrutinized realism, and the movie serves up generous helpings of both. Running through it is a master image: running. It is by running away from unfairly superior persecutors or from undeserved predicaments that Forrest achieves his prodigious success--as college football player, war hero, Ping-Pong ace (U.S.A. v. China), and finally sheer runner, racing for almost three years from one end of America to the other and back again.

Fleeing from life, he soon acquires followers: a large group of hangers-on who chase after him at a respectful distance, hoping for some sort of fulfillment. Along the way, persons with various projects that haven't quite jelled run alongside Forrest for a bit, and he helps them to the most successful slogans and thingamajigs of our era. His televised running further endears him to Jenny, the lovely girl who has been his lifelong girlfriend, as the poor sap imagines, even though, only platonically fond of him, she has ditched him in every conceivable way. Still, he was always there for her as she went from goodtime girl to stripper to folk singer to hippie activist, and finally to waitress.

Jenny started with all the advantages, being smart, pretty, and always on the go. But she had been an abused child, which may explain her seamier doings. Forrest, on the other hand, was the overprotected bastard of his loving, goofy, kookily wise mother, whose quirky precepts have guided him through life, along with Jenny's exhortation, "Run, Forrest, run!" Sure enough, Forrest ends up a millionaire businessman, and Jenny, who would come back to him periodically to be recharged, now comes to him for good. But the ending is not allowed to be happy, only bittersweet.

Mr. Zemeckis, who gave us Roger Rabbit and Back to the Future, among others, has always specialized in technical sleight-of-hand. Forrest Gump abounds in it: the hero is more or less seamlessly blended into scenes with Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, also with George Wallace and John Lennon, thanks to a technique pioneered by Woody Allen in Zelig. The confrontations, complete with dialogue, are visually and aurally convincing (except for the lennon one, where John is rather too big for Gump), yet for all their crowd-pleasing aspect, they seem to me to undermine the story, at least in a visual medium.

Elvis, still young and unfamous, meets little Forrest in his mother's boarding house. Because both of them are actors, the scene works better than when Nixon is actually Nixon, or Lennon Lennon. We are not forced to admire the trickery, and can go with the amiably factitious flow. A novel, because we don't see what is described, can get away with much more. In the New York Times, Janet Maslin pointed out the script's pusillanimity: the novel's "Let me say this: being an idiot is no box of chocolates" is edulcorated into "My mother used to say life is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're gonna get." That's a bonbon of a different flavor.

Gump wonders whether we are here for a purpose or whether everything is mere happenstance. He concludes that it is a blend of the two: we are purposeful drifters, savants and idiots; life, it would appear, is meaningfully meaningless. Such as this message is, the movie captures only the random side of it fully, and two and a quarter hours of randomness can wear pretty thin. If a millionaire decides to run around for a couple of years, wouldn't he at least have a backpack? I can respect an idiot savant, but not one who doesn't brush his teeth for three years. Even fantasy has to play by some sort of rules, however fanciful.