Rethinking Forrest Gump
by Scott Hardie on October 6, 2006
Inspired by a conversation this past weekend, I've been thinking about the once-popular movie Forrest Gump. It has fallen out of favor with people who prefer its contemporaries Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption and believe it robbed them of Oscars, but to me all three films are good. Gump succeeds because of a lot of factors, but consider its acting and its visual effects. I've often heard it said that a bad performance is when you're aware it's only an actor playing a role instead of disappearing into it convincingly. Tom Hanks had starred in a dozen box-office hits by that point in his career and was the reiging Best Actor from the year before, and yet despite his familiarity to millions of moviegoers, some people still believed he was genuinely retarded because he played Gump so well. That's acting! Along the same lines, the best visual effects are said to be the ones you never notice. Gary Sinise was unknown then, but some people actually thought he was a legless actor, or even more outrageously, that he actually had his legs amputated for the role! Either the acting and the special effects were so very good as to lead people to outlandish conclusions as plausible explanations for them, or the audience for the film was as dumb as its hero. Even I'm not cynical enough to believe the latter.
One Reply to Rethinking Forrest Gump
Logical Operator
The creator of Funeratic, Scott Hardie, blogs about running this site, losing weight, and other passions including his wife Kelly, his friends, movies, gaming, and Florida. Read more »
This Blog Post Definitely Doesn't Conform to NPOV Standards
I once coined a rule that you couldn't read more than three complete articles on Wikipedia without running into a reference to some obscure joke from The Simpsons, Monty Python, or most commonly, Family Guy. Seriously: I just now clicked two links and landed at Anarcho-syndicalism of all things, and sure enough, there's Holy Grail in the "trivia" section. Should it be plural like that, since no one is ever going to enter another item of trivia? Go »Blood Lines
A few weeks ago, I dropped a glass bottle of salad dressing on the kitchen floor, making the house smell like vinaigrette for a day. Today, I stepped on the last errant bit of glass hiding in a crack of tile by the corner. Better my foot than the cat's paw, I guess; I don't lick between my toes. Go »Maybe It's Warwick Davis
(link) Go »Free-Fallin'
I enjoy safe hobbies like making websites, but there's something to be said for the dangerous ones: (link) Go »Retrospection
If I recall the dates correctly, yesterday would have been my grandmother's 100th birthday. She lived to just shy of her 89th, despite a lifetime of chain smoking. I remember her as a sweet, generous woman who liked to laugh and teach me life's simple pleasures; a typical afternoon for us was playing crazy eights and baking cinnamon rolls. Go »
Kris Weberg | October 15, 2006
The acting in Forrest Gump is fine. The problem with the film is thatr, aside from being a rather nice little tour of popular accounts of American history, it doesn't really add up to much of anything. The moral seems to be that simple-minded platitudes and a certain obliviousness equate to virtue. The plot is simply a contrivance to insert Forrest into as many recent historical events as possible without having much to say about any of them.
It looks very nice and it's quite pleasant for the running time (at least on a first viewing), but it's a fairly pointless film when all is said and done. And that, more than anything else, is why its reputation has suffered in comparison to the moral challenges of Pulp Fiction and the meatier study of virtue and character in The Shawshank Redemption.