An Alabama man with an IQ of 75 walks through three decades of American history. Six Oscars later, the film is still arguing with itself.
From a Savannah bus-stop bench, Forrest Gump tells his life story to a series of strangers who sit beside him. He grew up in Alabama with leg braces and an IQ of 75. He played college football. He fought in Vietnam, where he met Bubba, who was shrimp-obsessed, and Lieutenant Dan, who was destiny-obsessed. He shook the hand of three presidents. He ran across America for three years. He loved Jenny, his childhood friend, who was running from her own life in the opposite direction.
The film keeps returning to Jenny — abused as a child, lost in the counterculture, dying of an unnamed illness widely understood to be AIDS — and to the box of chocolates Forrest's mother gave him with a metaphor about life that the film never quite makes its mind up about.
Zemeckis and visual effects supervisor Ken Ralston pioneered the technique of digitally inserting Tom Hanks into real news footage. Hanks shakes JFK's hand, meets Nixon, appears on the Dick Cavett show with John Lennon. The technique looks dated now but in 1994 it felt like a magic trick — and it tied the film, deliberately and tightly, to the version of postwar America being told by network television.
That decision is the film's structural choice and also its political problem. Forrest is on the right side of every event because he's standing where the cameras are pointed. The Civil Rights movement is something he walks past without noticing. Vietnam is a place he survives. Watergate happens to a hotel he's staying in. The film treats American history as a series of moments to be witnessed, not contested.
Forrest's story is told as triumph; Jenny's is told as punishment. She's introduced as a child being abused, becomes a folk singer, joins the counterculture, gets beaten by an SDS boyfriend, does drugs, considers suicide, and finally returns to Forrest to die. The film's moral architecture is unmistakable: the obedient son who joins the army and trusts authority is rewarded; the daughter who questions, runs away and joins the movement is punished.
This is the longest-running argument about Forrest Gump and it has not been settled. Critics on the left have read it since 1994 as a conservative parable. Defenders read Jenny's arc as a portrait of trauma, not a verdict on the counterculture. Both readings are textually defensible. The film's reluctance to take a side is either its honesty or its failure of nerve, depending on which week you watch it.
The performance could have been catastrophic. Hanks is playing a man with an intellectual disability across forty years of his life. The script's syrup quotient is high. What Hanks does is play him with no condescension and no performance of innocence. He plays him as a man with a smaller world and a steady inner life, and trusts the audience to find the dignity in that.
It is not a coincidence that this is the second of Hanks's back-to-back Best Actor Oscars (Philadelphia, 1993; Forrest Gump, 1994). For about three years he was the most precisely calibrated dramatic actor working in mainstream American film.