Word: gumps
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...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...
...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...
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...
...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...
...Gump, however, refuses to suggest its idiot might be mistaken -- he must come out a winner. Thus by the closing credits, he is triumphantly spouting the same faux wisdom as at the beginning: "Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get." And America is cheering...