7/25/2023 0 Comments Forrest gump bubba gump soundbyteAt heart, this is a bit of modern American mythmaking in the Mark Twain and transcendentalist tradition. In this way, Forrest Gump frames its romanticization of halcyon days where parents would shield your eyes from Elvis Presley shaking those hips, or later when “Camelot” was stuck on repeat in the Kennedy White House, with a sardonic quality that both makes its story sillier and more substantial. The movie is as sweet as Gump’s first line about boxes and chocolates, but unlike a lot of the feel-good movies of its era, Zemeckis’ picture brings some of the same sly playfulness and wry sense of humor that made spending time with the inhabitants of Hill Valley so appealing across three movies and a hundred years of history in the Back to the Future trilogy. And he survives them all with only honesty and niceness as his shields.” Its hero, played by Tom Hanks, is a thoroughly decent man with an IQ of 75, who manages between the 1950s and the 1980s to become involved in every major event in American history. “The screenplay by Eric Roth has the complexity of modern fiction,” wrote Ebert ahead of the movie’s release, “not the formulas of modern movies. In his four-star and effusive review of Forrest Gump, Roger Ebert recognized indisputable qualities in the Zemeckis film. That same crop of Americans have largely maintained power and wealth, but the threads in one of their seminal fairytale tapestries is starting to look threadbare. Nearly 30 years later, a movie so obsessed with navel-gazing at the “Me Generation” plays differently. Instead this is a picture-perfect postcard of the way the generation it’s obsessed with saw itself in middle age and at the beginning of a total (and continuing) dominance of the American mainstream… and all the fractures therein that were about to occur.įorrest and Jenny, the straight arrow and the hippie, are not products of the turbulent times in which they lived, including the during the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the beginning of the women’s liberation movement they are products of how middle class, suburban values liked to reframe those struggles through rose-tinted glasses. And by that I do not mean as a testament to how that pivotal generation has transformed (and continues to transform) American culture, nor that it is a reflection of the tumultuous times it depicts with rustic good humor. Nonetheless, after revisiting the movie for the first time in at least a decade, I would argue its true lasting legacy is as the quintessential landmark in Baby Boomer Cinema. Things like the dueling American experience of the “moral majority” via Hanks’ simple yet profoundly wise military veteran with a knack for being in the right place at the right time, and the counterculture that didn’t buy into that system, man, a la Robin Wright Wright as Jenny, the wayward love of Forrest’s life. How could it not? This was a film about things. Grown men on the nightly news would get teary-eyed while speaking about how it touched them, emotionally. And I’m not even talking about my own household. While I was too young to see Forrest Gump in theaters (or even initially on VHS), I do recall the hushed superlatives adults of a certain age spoke of it. For all intents and purposes, Forrest Gump was hailed as an instant masterpiece in 1994 and crowned an Important Movie. Yet the fact the movie has lingered in our pop culture subconscious for more than a quarter-century shouldn’t be entirely surprising. This is a testament to the staying power of Eric Roth’s screenplay (adapted from Winston Groom’s Forrest Gump novel), and the mythic way Zemeckis realized it onscreen. You don’t need to have even seen Robert Zemeckis’ 1994 movie to know what someone means if they tell you, “Stupid is as stupid does.” Rather these are phrases that have seeped into the bedrock of our shared cultural lexicon. “Run, Forrest, run! ” “that day, for no particular reason, I decided to go for a little run ” “my mama always said life was like a box of chocolates.” The folksy Southern truisms uttered throughout Forrest Gump by a guileless Tom Hanks and an incredible supporting cast are more than mere movie quotables.
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