Word: forrestic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...also a sleek Hollywoodizing, a ruthlessly canny face-lift of Groom's novel. In the book, Forrest was just as naive but not quite so innocent or lucky: he had some sex, did some drugs and missed out on the nuclear family that in the movie Forrest finally gets to tend. In pumping up Jenny's role, screenwriter Eric Roth transferred all of Forrest's flaws -- and most of the excesses Americans committed in the '60s and '70s to her. Wright's Jenny is a frail soul in tailspin, a battered child in a beautiful woman's body. And Forrest...
...younger viewers, then, Forrest Gump serves as a gentle introduction to the '60s: baptism not by fire but by sound track. And to those who raged, suffered or sinned through that insane decade, the movie offers absolution with a love pat. Whaddaya know? We waged a stupid war that destroyed both another country and the best part of ourselves; we tore up our streets and our psyches in a kind of Cultural Revolution; we practically killed ourselves with drugs -- and it turns out we're not guilty. By allowing us to relive all the evils of recent history through invulnerably...
...Filmmakers often say the American public doesn't want complicated films full of thought," says Field, who is outstanding as the heroic mom in this edgy valentine. "They are wrong. They underestimate the intelligence of the American audience." But does Forrest Gump make you think? No, it makes you feel -- or, at best, makes you think about what you feel, and about how long it has been since a movie found those remote corners of sympathy and sentiment...
From a film industry that softens virtually any contentious social issue -- aids, the Holocaust, Vietnam -- into a fable with a happy ending, Forrest is the ultimate sentimental figure. He embodies that noble Hollywood precept, the spiritual superiority of the handicapped. Forrest is not the ranter on the subway or the sullen, overgrown lad at the back of the class. He is -- well, just...
...neat trick about Forrest is he can symbolize so many people. New York Times columnist Frank Rich has compared him to Bill Clinton. But Forrest's simple optimism and his success as an entrepreneur and a reviver of American confidence could make him an emblem of '80s conservatism: not only Reaganomics but what Republicans might call Reaganethics. He's E.T. with a little Gandhi thrown in. He's Candide making the best of the worst of all possible worlds. And in his influence on events, from the capture of the Watergate burglars to John Lennon's composition of the song...