Forrest Dump

Forrest Gump
*****

There is a great scene in The X-Files when Cancer Man, dejected after receiving some bad news, decrees that “Life is like a box of chocolates. It’s a cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that nobody ever asks for. Unreturnable because all you ever get back is another box of chocolates, so you’re stuck with this unidentifiable whipped mint crap that you mindlessly wolf down when there’s nothing left to eat. Sure, once in a while there’s a peanut butter cup or an English toffee, but they’re gone too fast and the taste is fleeting. So you end up with up with nothing but broken bits with hardened jelly and teeth-shattering nuts. If you’re desperate enough to eat that, all you have left is an empty box filled with useless brown paper wrappers.”

Although that probably doesn’t reflect a healthy outlook on life, it does accurately describe the films released in 1994. There were a few “peanut butter cups”--gems like The Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, and Clerks--but most of the movies that year were best described as “unidentifiable crap that you mindlessly wolf down when there’s nothing left to watch.”

As it is, that phrase perfectly describes Forrest Gump. Forrest Gump is the film equivalent of a lobotomy.

Never has such a mindless film won the Oscar for Best Picture. The silly smiley face that the title character “invented” is a perfect metaphor for the film. As movies go, it was mildly entertaining, and Tom Hanks’ acting was good as always, but what was the point? That if we just stopped thinking about things, the world would become a better place?

But more than the movie’s hackneyed appeal to simplicity, I think Forrest Gump was so popular because of lingering Baby Boomer nostalgia for “the good ole days”--which, in case you weren’t paying attention, weren’t so good. The major social issues of the time, particularly Vietnam, Civil Rights, and the sexual revolution are painted with such meaningless and euphemistic strokes that you get the feeling the '60s were just bland feel-good years of no real significance.

The liberation of women is dealt a particularly nasty blow. The one character who pushed back against the film's onslaught of right wing values was Jenny, played by Robin Wright Penn. But what happens to her? Oh, well, we have to give her HIV. The liberated woman must be punished.

That Forrest Gump beat Shawshank and Pulp Fiction--two of the best movies of the decade, let alone of 1994--for Best Picture is a Hollywood travesty. It's shamefully ironic that a film with such a great soundtrack would so closely approximate an on-screen rendering of Muzak.