This 1994 movie cleaned up at the AAs that year winning Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Tom Hanks) and three other awards.
The idea of merging filmed actors with documentary footage had actually been first done a decade before in Woody Allen’s more intelligent, more successful satire Zelig. Director Zemickis and his visual effects team, though, do a pretty seamless job with both audio and video in adapting the original historical footage to incorporate scenes with Forrest.
The scenes tend to be brief and are rely heavily on visuals rather than dialogue. There is also more a sense of cobbling together scenes with numerous allusive musical sound bytes rather than any developed dramatic scenes dependent on strong acting or dialogue. All which lends a shallowness to the overall movie, making it more a ‘outlined cliched spectacle’ rather than a conventional, truly dramatic movie.
The film is mostly a romantic satire which diminishes each these genres given the number of corny cliches and stereotypes that pile up as well as the amount of physical farce used for cheap laughs. In short, it is impossible to take the movie seriously which it asks its viewers to do on many stereotypical occasions.
Tom Hanks’ performance, like other handicapped AA actor-winners (My Left Foot, Rain Man, Scent of a Woman), is one noteish throughout with his sustained voice tone belieing any belief in any depth to his character.
True, there are many jokes, but many of them would be considered politically incorrect today. And there is the over-the-top stereotyping of Bubba and Capt. Dan (a deranged Capt. Ahab who miraculously reforms) which becomes tired and hard to identify with or laugh at.
Much too often, Forrest simply responds to problems by running or clobbering someone which make it hard to identify with his limited range and abilities. Often, the humor becomes crude (Forrest getting shot in the buttocks) and the exaggerated film violence uncomfortable (Jenny being viciously beaten by her radical boyfriend).
Finally, it is the repetitiveness, the cornyness, the cobbled-together atmosphere, and the limitations of simpleness that does this film in. Forrest Gump would not win 6 AAs in 2020 and would, instead, garner many protests. It has some dazzling special effects (Lt. Dan’s legs, the Washington march scene), but it is sabotaged by trying to do too many things sans much meaningfulness beyond cliche.
At the risk of being a ‘party pooper’ (“Everyone loves Forrest Gump”), in retrospect, I still think the film was way over-contrived and way overwrought. Though a satire, Forrest Gump‘s awkward mixed-messaging muddies and muddles the engaging film’s purpose.