Forrest Gump: Love it or Hate it?

In the 30 years since becoming a box-office phenomenon, en route to winning six Oscars, including best picture, director, actor and adapted screenplay, Forrest Gump has settled into the culture as a significant achievement, canonized by its induction into the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry – and, to a slightly lesser extent, by the few dozen Bubba Gump Shrimp Company restaurants worldwide.

Other best picture nominees may be more beloved, like The Shawshank Redemption, or influential, like Pulp Fiction, but none that captured the public imagination on quite the same scale.

And yet it’s still worth asking, after all this time: What is the deal with this movie? What is it actually trying to say?

These are not rhetorical questions, at least not entirely. Adapted loosely from Winston Groom’s picaresque novel about an unlikely savant’s era-spanning brushes with history, Forrest Gump has become of the great Rorschach blots of American cinema, a film so studiously apolitical that it reflect whatever ideology you wish to project on it. The National Review has cited it multiple times as one of the best conservative movies of all time, but that interpretation mostly feels like filling in a vacuum that doesn’t exist in, say, an Oliver Stone movie, where the point of view is much firmer. It’s a weird case where you search haplessly for a reason why it was made yet it resonates deeply with millions of people. What a long, strange trip it has been.

The most straightforward explanation for Forrest Gump’s success is how readily audiences lock into the sweet, innocent, off-kilter charms of Gump himself, an affable guy from rural Alabama who was named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, but possesses a milder temperament than his namesake.

In Groom’s novel, Forrest is more on-the-spectrum, with a low IQ and a massive frame that makes him seem oafish, but who likes Mark Twain, is a natural at chess, and can do enough math in his head to be recruited by Nasa.

Eric Roth’s screenplay turns him more into a lobotomized Zelig, drifting through a consequential stretch of American history with decency and pure intentions, but with the processing speed of a vintage Texas Instruments TI-99.……

https://www.theguardian.com/film/ar...-gump-30th-anniversary?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other