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 »
R.I.P. Mom
You were so still in your bed when I could finally sit down beside you, a few hours after the facility notified me that you had died. I hadn't seen you be that peaceful in years, your eyes not scanning the room for clues, your hands not turning over each object in front of you for endlessly repeated examination. I whispered to you the most urgent and most precious things I had to say, the secrets and atonements and wishes foremost on my mind. Go »The Serpent
This is the third of four weekly blog posts about diagnoses that have completely changed my life since the pandemic started, after The Dragon and The Tiger. 2020 was hard on all of us. We all lost friends and family. Go »Scary Mary
New horror film? Thanks, Jon. Go »Emails!
Does the Internet baffle you? Try Gabe & Max's Internet Thing. Thanks, Marlon. Go »Fantastic
The 20th Century Fox sequel "Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer" debuted as the No. 1 weekend flick with $57.4 million in sales, slightly surpassing the $56.1 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.