Forrest Gump (1994) Review: History Through Innocent Eyes

Is Forrest Gump worth watching?

Yes. Forrest Gump is one of the great American crowd-pleasers, a big-hearted, beautifully constructed epic that moves from slapstick to heartbreak without losing its footing, with Tom Hanks at his most indelible. Robert Zemeckis turns three decades of American upheaval into a picaresque told by a man who does not fully understand what he is witnessing, and the effect is both funny and quietly devastating. Its sentimentality and its tidy view of history have always divided critics, but as popular filmmaking, it is close to flawless.

What is Forrest Gump about?

Forrest Gump opens with a man sitting on a bus-stop bench, telling his life story to whoever sits beside him. Forrest (Tom Hanks) grew up in small-town Alabama with a low IQ, leg braces and a fiercely devoted mother (Sally Field), who refuses to let anyone set limits on him. His one true friend is Jenny (Robin Wright), a troubled girl from a hard home, and he loves her all his life.

From there, Forrest’s story drifts, almost by accident, through the major events of postwar America. He turns out to be very fast, very loyal and remarkably lucky, which takes him to college football, to Vietnam alongside the ambitious Lieutenant Dan (Gary Sinise) and his friend Bubba (Mykelti Williamson), and into a string of encounters with history that he barely registers. All the while, Jenny’s life takes a far rockier path through the counterculture.

Zemeckis directs from Eric Roth’s adaptation of Winston Groom’s novel. It is an English-language American film, runs 142 minutes and won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor for Hanks.

Tom Hanks makes innocence believable

The whole film depends on Hanks, and he makes an extraordinarily difficult role look effortless. Forrest could easily have been a gimmick or a condescending caricature, but Hanks plays him with complete sincerity: slow, literal and unselfconscious, yet never stupid about the things that matter. His flat delivery turns simple lines into jokes and then, a few scenes later, into moments of real grief.

The supporting cast gives the film its range. Sally Field brings steel to Forrest’s mother, Mykelti Williamson makes Bubba a warm comic presence, and Gary Sinise, as a proud officer whose sense of destiny is tied to the war, gives the film its bitterest and most complex character. Robin Wright has the hardest job, playing a woman whose damage the film understands better than it sometimes lets her express.

Zemeckis turns history into a comic odyssey

Zemeckis was one of Hollywood’s great technical showmen, and Forrest Gump uses its effects in the service of storytelling. The celebrated sequences in which Hanks appears inside archival footage alongside presidents and public figures are still clever, but they work because they are jokes about how history happens to ordinary people. Forrest is always present, never quite in the picture.

The structure is equally well engineered. The bench narration lets the film leap across decades with ease, and the period soundtrack of rock, soul and folk hits does much of the scene-setting. Alan Silvestri’s score, especially its drifting feather theme, supplies the tenderness. At 142 minutes, the film feels generous rather than long.

The sentimentality that still divides

Forrest Gump’s gifts are also what its critics object to. Its view of the 1960s and 70s can seem to favour Forrest’s simple decency over Jenny’s restless search for freedom, and some viewers find the film’s judgement of her unfair. The film also smooths over the political anger of the era in favour of personal feeling. These are real arguments, but they do not diminish how skilfully the film makes audiences laugh and cry, often in the same scene.

Who should watch Forrest Gump?

It is ideal for anyone who loves big, emotional Hollywood storytelling, for families with teenagers and for viewers who want a film that spans an era. Newcomers should expect a long, episodic structure that rewards patience. The Vietnam sequences include combat violence, and the film deals with abuse, drug use and grief, so it suits teenagers and up.

If it moves you, try these:

• City Lights, Chaplin’s classic about a gentle outsider devoted to a woman, balancing comedy and pathos with similar grace.
• Past Lives, a very different, quieter film about childhood love that endures across decades.
• Casablanca, for another Hollywood classic that folds a love story into the sweep of history.

The verdict

Forrest Gump is a masterpiece of popular filmmaking: warm, funny, grief-stricken and built with enormous craft around one of Tom Hanks’s defining performances. Its sentiment and its politics will always have critics, but few films have made so many audiences feel so much, and it remains essential viewing.

Rating: 5/5