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...beginning and end of Forrest Gump, as millions know, feature a feather. A lovely little feather, seemingly unbound by gravity. It floats over houses, churches and trees. It may dip or settle, only to rise again, triumphant, borne by a breeze...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Forrest Gump Is Dumb | 8/29/1994 | See Source »

...Gumped, here is a jaundiced synopsis: Forrest, a nice young man with an IQ of 75 and a freak talent as a runner, survives bullying in his small-minded hometown; survives Vietnam and wins a Medal of Honor; survives a freak storm on the Gulf Coast that wipes out all other shrimpers, making him fabulously rich; and survives (as in outlives) his sweetheart Jenny, a sad, bad girl who nonetheless leaves behind Forrest Gump Jr. Gump also manages to inject himself, Zelig-like, into a fair amount of historical film footage...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Forrest Gump Is Dumb | 8/29/1994 | See Source »

...queasy feeling began during the film's key Vietnam scene. There is an ambush: Forrest saves some of his platoon; others die; his lieutenant loses his legs. A certain horror attends the explosions and deaths but so does a strong feeling that things here are happening by the book. As indeed they are. The grunts have not died in vain: they have died as a plot device, to facilitate Gump's upward float -- and the film's apparent message: act decent, stay positive (brains optional), and everything will be fine...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Forrest Gump Is Dumb | 8/29/1994 | See Source »

Well, fine for Gump. In fact, although Forrest is a good man, he is not a good man to know. The lieutenant (whose injury remains a focus of fascination, if only because Industrial Light & Magic, George Lucas' special-effects house, did such a great job "erasing" his legs in subsequent scenes) actually gets off easy. Gump walks between the bombs: everyone else, whether famous (John Lennon, George Wallace) or intimate (Jenny), gets hit. Assassination, cancer, AIDS: surely Forrest would not have wanted it scripted that way. But he's not the screenwriter. As it is, after each death Tom Hanks...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Forrest Gump Is Dumb | 8/29/1994 | See Source »

...Forrest is hardly the first idiot hero to ride through a fiction, bodies dropping all around him. The Czechs celebrate the apparently obtuse Good Soldier Schweik, whereas in terms of plot Voltaire's Candide might have been a Gump pilot. Yet Schweik is not so much a defense of dumb optimism as an argument against militarism and a celebration of sly peasant smarts. And Candide may be literature's most ferocious send-up of cheeriness in the face of the world's cruelties. By its end, its battered hero has abandoned his opening premise that everything happens for the best...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Forrest Gump Is Dumb | 8/29/1994 | See Source »

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