Review of Forrest Gump (1994) by Giorgi751 — 10 Dec 2015

The root problem of this movie is the character payoff. We sense that loving the character is not enough, alas we have to respect him as well. Personally, I can remember myself having respect for the dumbest or the most wicked characters. Certainly, there is a way of sentimentalizing a character who saves several lives in a shootout and loses a friend in his arms but when I’m watching a guy who does all this because his mind rings “Run Forrest, Run!”, my sentimentalism feels more like a wet dream.

I was jerked around all over as my sympathy was about to get milked at any minute, regardless of how preposterous the reason was. And, they succeeded damn well but after about an hour when the movie was finished I felt deceived. This may be a great movie, I’m not sure. But it definitely is the great (if not the greatest) manipulation.

One thing I really, just honestly don’t understand is the film’s stuborness about pedalling this so called simplicity of the main hero. Even in the most tearjerking scenes, Forrest seems totally disconnected, and he is.There was a movie called Awakenings, where characters were in lethargy and I can assume they actually couldn’t understand most of what was happening around. The diferrence is that in that movie the characters were in a center of our curious exploration and we gradually began to feel familiar with them on more fundamental level too. Unlike them Forrest Gump(could be Forrest Dumb) is a container of emptiness, something that keeps your attachment just as much as you are being involved overall. And still he sometimes gets to be the center of the drama here. This is the problem: the movie wants to sentimentalize him no matter what and is too greedy to admit that he’s above all a storytelling device. If the movie had chosen that ground of awareness, I wonder what would’ve been made of it.

Watching Forrest Gump is like experiencing those moments of euphoria when your mind is being overly selective about events in your life and everything seems to make sense. While, having finished watching it is like unfolding bitter truths about the same events, analyzing them more thoroughly and eventually understanding they were much less meaningful and much less uniquely related to each other than you thought.

So, does this mean Forrest Gump is about life? Yes, it does. More specifically, if somebody asked me what this film is about, I would say it is about false glimpses of one’s life. The creators of this movie know this but I suggest you not to get annoyed too much. Just take your time and consider everybody already knows what you have to say. After all, there must be kind of a challenge to make a movie that wins people’s admiration and makes them despise that very admiration.