Smells like propoganda by the House for Un-American Activities. Highly unpalatable.
Written: Nov 01 '99 (Updated Nov 01 '99)
Product Rating:
Pros: Everything technical about this film is polished. Pacing, Effects, Script. Everything.
Cons: Every single bit of polish has been used to cynically repackage a difficult time in American history in order to suit a conservative political agenda
I have to get something off my chest. I don't think Forrest Gump is badly acted, badly paced or even particularly badly written. Instead I think it has been put together with great skill, and manages to be affecting in quite a sophisticated manner.
And that makes it all the more insidious, because Forrest Gump has to be one of the most politically reactionary, conservative, right-wing films I have ever seen.
But I get ahead of myself. Let's start with the story. Forrest (mostly Tom Hanks)gets picked on at school, but after having his legs pinned for some reason, he suddenly finds himself able to run very fast. This is when he meets the girl who will follow him throughout his life and on whom he will always have a crush.
Poor Forrest is a bit dim, and his mother (ably played by Sally Field, who has passed that magic 40-year old barrier for women in Hollywood and is now only able to play doting grandmothers on the brink of death) has to sleep with the principal to keep him in regular school. He remains ever naive, ever pure...
From school he finds himself in the Army during Vietnam, where he accidentally excels. He meets his teenage crush again and she has fallen in with anti-war demonstrators. He looses touch with her, and starts his own shrimp company with his ex-commander. Etc etc etc. As time passes he leads an exceptional life - stumbling good-heartedly through any number of important historical events. But will he ever meet his girl again?
Now lets look at that plot again - imagine it as two stories (one Forrest's and one his girlfriend's). They intersect continually as the film progresses, showing two different paths through the period.
Forrest joins the army, doesn't disagree with authority figures, doesn't involve himself in any of the civil rights disputes. Fights for his country. Starts a successful business which makes him rich through hard work and a good idea. His commitment to commie-bashing and democracy is made clear through regular visits to the White House.
His girlfriend on the other hand follows a very different path. All the "good" "reasonable" "American" things (very much strict Republican values) that Forrest does, she doesn't do. Instead she does all the experimental, left-wing or liberal things of the period. And boy does she get punished for them.
She supports the anti-war protests in Washington. During this, she starts to go out with a member of the Black Panthers. He beats her around pretty nastily (which is what you get if you didn't approve of Vietnam and had the nerve to have an inter-racial relationship), but she doesn't have the self-respect to leave him. Her anti-war position marks her as as dangerous self-destructive woman - so she necessarily gets into cocaine during the 1970s and the disco era. This leads to addiction, sexual promiscuity, and subsequently the contraction of HIV.
She is only redeemed later when Forrest meets her again when she has given birth to his son, got herself a job as a nurse, made her hair look very conservative and reasonable - god, how much more predictable could this be? I can't remember if she finds god at any time around here, but I wouldn't be in the least surprised.
And the final payoff - the reason she took issue with the illegal acts of her president, the pointless and destructive war that almost destroyed a generation of American youth. The reason she supported rights and equality for black people...
She was abused as a child.
It must be very clear that I am politically more Democrat than Republican (or in England, more Labour than Conservative). But I don't think you have to be of this political bent to find such appalling rewriting of American history to be offensive. The soldiers who suffered in Vietnam, the campaigners who ushered in a period of political accountability, that today may be being slowly lost again - these people deserve better than to be passed over, caricatured and insulted.
I said at the beginning that Forrest Gump was well constructed, well acted, and well written. And I stand by that. But it is important that people are aware of the way that their past is being repackaged to service political positions, so I cannot, in good faith, rate it purely on those grounds. A profoundly disturbing film.
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