The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015. Remaining movies: 263 Days to go: 258
Movie #114: Forrest Gump
If you talk to people about Forrest Gump today — “movie” people, especially — I find they are pretty derisive about it. They say it’s simple and hokey and cloying, that it’s not a great movie, that it’s one of those laughable Oscar picks from years gone by that no one would ever take seriously today. But I saw Forrest Gump with my mom on opening weekend. And I was well and fully aware of Tom Hanks having just won the Best Actor Oscar a few months prior for the previous year’s Philadelphia. Yet I sat there in the darkened theater in awe of Hanks’s performance as Forrest, and I knew he would win the Oscar again. Couldn’t deny it. And it wasn’t like years later when I knew Denzel had won the moment his nomination was announced for Training Day — I didn’t even need to see the movie to know that one, although seeing the movie only cemented my certainty. With Forrest Gump, I was kind of in disbelief as I watched, telling myself it simply wasn’t done, to have someone win twice in a row. It almost never happened, but none of my arguments convinced me. Hanks embodied an entirely different soul in that movie, completely shedding everything that made him Tom Hanks. I knew, without a shadow of the doubt, that he would win the Oscar, and no one would find a way to deviate me from that belief for the next eight or so months.
There was also a bit of a kerfuffle later that year, when Pulp Fiction came out — another groundbreaking and earth-shattering film in a year full of them — that Forrest Gump shouldn’t win Best Picture. Truth be told, I love both of those movies, as well as two others of that year’s Best Picture nominees (Four Weddings and a Funeral and The Shawshank Redemption), and if I were picking on that twenty-year-old ballot it would be Shawshank by a mile and a half. But it was twenty years ago and I don’t get a vote anyway, and Forrest Gump is exactly the kind of movie the Academy loves — feel-good, crowd-pleasing, well-acted, touching and completely non-controversial. Of course it was going to win.
The thing is, though, Forrest Gump is all those things. It’s delightful and funny and just fun to watch, plain and simple. The jokes are light and easy, the characters are charming, and the soundtrack is flipping great. (Best music cue: right after Lt. Dan (Gary Sinise) has given Forrest and Bubba (Mykelti Williamson) the rundown on how to act in Vietnam, there’s the faint sound of The Beach Boys “Sloop John B,” “This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on.”) Sally Field is just the perfect amount of fierce and homespun to be Forrest’s mom, and Robin Wright (who I can see resembling herself in later roles, all the way to House of Cards, but who I can’t, for the life of me, see her resembling herself as Buttercup in The Princess Bride — like, at all) as Jenny is all soft heart and hard edges and she walks that line really well. Even the stuff that could easily look outdated in the twenty years of advancements that have occurred since the film was released — the archival footage with Forrest grafted in, Lt. Dan with no legs — is still virtually unnoticeable as CGI.
And who doesn’t still smile at Bubba’s list of shrimp or at seeing Forrest jump off his boat to swim to Lt. Dan, only to have the boat crash into the dock behind them? It’s still incredibly charming and incredibly quotable and incredibly fun to watch. It just is.
“You ever been on a real shrimp boat?”
“No, but I’ve been on a real big boat.”
I mean, come on. That’s funny.
Viable Option 