Idiot's Delight
Forrest Gump is the only major studio film which attempts
to penetrate the gray matter of summer crowds. The tag line for the poster
reads: "The world will never be the same once you've seen it through the
eyes of Forrest Gump". One can feel the trepidation of the usually boisterous
publicity department in this ambiguous, double-edged statement. No doubt The
Flintstones, Speed or Wolf would have been an easier sell.
But Forrest Gump is different; at least in terms of summer releases. The
director Robert Zemeckis deserves kudos for an attempt to escape his Back to the Future past. If
prizes could be given for "good intentions" Forrest Gump would
sweep. Regrettably the film fails to measure up.
"What is Forrest Gump?". The question is
simple and straightforward but one wonders whether anyone ever bothered to pose
it to Mr. Zemeckis. His work evokes a hodgepodge of other films. It possess the
grand Southern allegory of Everybody's All American without that film's straightforward
storyline and well-delineated characters. It contains Zelig's use of
history as backdrop without raising the technique to more than very slick gimmickry.
It shares the "central character as fool" device of Being There
but Tom Hanks (who plays Forrest Gump) lacks Peter Sellars' charm and comic timing. All these other films,
despite their flaws, were consistent and defined. Forrest Gump never
gelled. It unfolded, failed to evolve and finally stopped. The audience, upon
leaving the theater, will share the bemused bewilderment of Tom Hank's at the
bus stop: Dat wus real purty but I's not real sure jis whu' in da hec jis
happin'.
The Achilles heel of this film is that it is a romance. This
tale can only succeed if the audience cares about the lovers' amorous yearnings.
In this case the pair seems to be drawn together by fate's cruel whip rather
than cupid's arrow. A mentally deficient boy and a girl who is the victim of
incest elicit heartfelt pity rather than sentimental passion. The bond is
strong but it is forged in a desperate struggle for survival. If this were a
"buddy picture" the audience could accept their camaraderie. Unfortunately
for everyone these friends start sleeping together. There is something
inherently unbalanced about the pairing. It is forced and can only be believed
if the woman of normal IQ is led by horrible circumstance into a shotgun
wedding of sorts. The union becomes the romantic equivalent of the two
farmhands in Of Mice and Men escaping to live out their lives married in
some remote paradise. In the end Forrest Gump is a love story in which
the audience wishes the two lovers never became involved. The film masks this contradiction
with a bizarre melodramatic finish which forces the couple to be eternally
together without actually having to be eternally together.
Forrest's friendships faired better than his love life. He
manages to connect with two army buddies: Bubba Blue (Mykelti Williamson) and
Lieutenant Dan Taylor (Gary Sinise). Both relationships are believable. These
comrades are just that, comrades - they are severely handicapped: Bubba
mentally, Taylor physically & emotionally. Both Sinise and Williamson play
their hearts out but their efforts are crushed by poor writing. No matter how
hard these fine actors try they can not escape the hollow characterizations of
a gung-ho army brat and Step'n'fetchit's grandson. There is no need to give
these characters lines. All that they require is to repeat their names aloud
when called upon: "I's Bubba Blue, shrimpman", "I'm Lieutenant
Dan Taylor, U.S. Army". The powers that be seem to gloss over the blatant
racist characterture of Bubba with the fact that Forrest himself is a Caucasian
dumbo. The movie never addresses why Forrest's mom only has one child as
compared to Bubba's mother who is a human fruit fly in terms of procreation.
Incidentally, Sally Field, Forrest's mom, is as dull as Robin Wright, Jenny the
love interest, but it would be foolish to blame them. This film sees women as
unavoidable, but necessary, distractions which keep those important male actors
working. Since there is a dearth of significant female leads in major motion
pictures it would be cruel to chastise them for taking the roles. All this
might seem nit-picky. After all the entire film is pure fantasy and should be
seen as a light-hearted summer film. Or should it?
Zemeckis never reveals his point of view. There are many
sequences which are pure slapstick: the hokey repetition sequences showing
generations of relatives involved in identical tasks, the endless running joke
of Forrest running, the ping-pong games… There are others which have the sacchariness
of church-sanctioned religious programming: Jenny's flight from her drunken
father, Forrest's "the lame shall walk" escape, the "salvation"
from the hurricane, the coast to coast false prophet sequence… Zemeckis places
these two styles amidst many moments of stark realism: the vivid cruelty
exhibited towards young Forrest & Jenny, the Vietnam battle, the excesses
of the '60s radicals, Jenny's struggle with drugs and abusive men and an
endless stream of historical re-enactments done with state of the art
technology. It is strange, given all the slapstick and the parables that
Zemeckis spent so much time and effort* striving to realistically re-create Kennedy, Wallace, Johnson, Nixon,
John Lennon… (*not
to mention money - almost one quarter of the film credits are dedicated to the
people at the world's premiere effects house, Industrial Light and Magic). This
is certainly an interesting cinematic development. Forrest Gump deserves
to be recognized as the first mass-market film which demonstrates technology can
now resurrect anyone ever captured on film and integrate them into a fictional
narrative . It might not be 100 percent authentic but it is close enough to open
a Pandora's box of artistic and legal questions. All good and well but how does
all this affect Mr. Gump? In short it doesn't. It only complicates the telling
of the simpleton's story.
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