Still running: "Forrest Gump" at 30

Here is the most contentious American film of the late 20th century, and possibly even my lifetime. I first saw Forrest Gump as an empty-headed teenager in 1994, was broadly entertained by it, and would likely have forgotten all about it were it not for the fractious rows that kept breaking out around it - initially in the film press, then online - over whether it was really any good, whether it deserved to beat Pulp Fiction to the Best Picture Oscar, and what exactly the film has been trying to communicate to us. Revisiting the film this past weekend as it marks its 30th anniversary, I was struck by the fact that even its initial framing device is contentious. A middle-aged Black nurse (Rebecca Williams), whose uniform suggests she might be heading to or from a long day at work, takes a seat on a bus-stop bench, where she immediately has her ear bent by a fellow traveller: a down-home figure who insists on regaling her in a semi-ludicrous drawling accent with the story of his life, starting with notionally benign small talk about how his grandfather invented the Ku Klux Klan. While the woman quickly senses that she has arrived at very much The Wrong Bus Stop, and starts wishing that Uber would hurry up and invent themselves, we are left to reflect upon a scene that now looks and sounds like 20th century mainstream American cinema in a nutshell: a Caucasian lecturing a non-Caucasian at length, offering her the occasional sweet while refusing to allow her to get a single word in edgeways. (If you think that's off, wait until we get to the sequence where the drawler and his beloved break up what the former calls "a Black Panther party" with their eminently white bullshit.)

What everyone's been arguing about is politics, which makes Forrest Gump as pertinent to 2024 as it was to 1994. Back then, Robert Zemeckis's film may have appeared as cinema's lavishly budgeted equivalent of those fin de siècle TV clip shows, whizzing us through the hits and misses of recent decades: the Klan, the Kennedys, the space race, Vietnam, Nixon, Watergate and everything else that had just been listed in Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire". (This may have been all pop culture was at the end of the century: a clearing house for boomers to come to terms with the choices they'd made, the boxes they'd opened, and what they were going to leave behind for the rest of us.) Instead of a cultural commentator, we got Gump himself (Tom Hanks), often digitally inserted into newsreel footage - for this was Zemeckis's opportunity to show computers could manipulate the historical record in much the same way others were conjuring T-rexes and twisters. The level of commentary turns out to be far less profound than one hears from the rent-a-gobs on today's Channel 5 clip shows. "The good thing about Vietnam is that there was always somewhere to go and always something to do," Gump drawls, having been dispatched in that general direction. 

Perhaps the most contentious aspect of Forrest Gump is this insistence on history as either busy work, passing spectacle or One Damn Thing After Another, with no greater consequences than the ping-pong games Gump later triumphs in. Yet Zemeckis (b. 1952) and writer Eric Roth (b. 1945), adapting the novel by Winston Green (b. 1943), do succeed in raising one poignant question: can you believe we saw and survived all this? Whether on the battlefield or in the bedroom, this American life is a matter of dodging bullets and bombshells; if we choose to view Gump as philosophical text - a Hollywood Candide - then there is some truth in the assertion that navigating this world requires a measure of dumb luck. What may still rankle is the failure to develop and extend that argument beyond the bookending images of a feather floating through time and space, carried hither and yon on the breeze: what lands on the screen in between makes no effort to investigate why Forrest winds up a shrimp tycoon, while his equally good-natured comrade-in-arms Bubba (Mykelti Williamson), who had the original idea, comes back from Vietnam in a box. It's not just dumb luck, is it now? 

Here as elsewhere, Gump seems in intriguingly close communication with a far more despairing film - the kind of film the studios might have allowed some young buck to get away with back in the 1970s, informed by the vagaries of the American experiment, and heading somewhere properly devastating rather than merely diverting. Zemeckis's version generally evinces an innocence - and a naivete - which couldn't ever last long in the new century: now we start to wonder how Forrest would react to 9/11, or the reemergence of Donald Trump. (That red baseball cap might have to go.) Even so, the film itself seems conflicted; certain frames and episodes seem to argue with those on either side of it. Zemeckis emerged from that generation of filmmakers who clung to the hope of making serious, grown-up films even as the American cinema took a decisive turn for the teeny and superficial, which is why even his best-known PG-13 blockbusters conceal tricky, awkward, often downright uncomfortable material. He got 1980's Used Cars in before everything changed, but 1985's Back to the Future had to persuade the mass audience it was fine that Marty McFly almost seduced his mother; Gump encompasses Momma Gump (Sally Field) fucking a headmaster to get her boy into school, the teenage Forrest's issues with premature ejaculation ("I think I ruined your roommate's bathrobe"), and everything to do with Jenny (Robin Wright), a throughline that is broadly as fun as seeing the Princess Bride passed around, rendered as centrefold (boomer blood runs cold) and finally torn to shreds. No-one can bring themselves to speak the acronym AIDS, which finally leaves Gump seeming more conservative, and with it more regressive, than the previous year's Philadelphia.

What's especially aggravating about the film now is that some of it still works. The business with Forrest becoming a superstar college athlete makes exactly the point a bunch of computer-obsessed movie nerds would want to make about the jocks who bullied them in high school: that superstar college athletes are often very dumb and very lucky. (They just run quick, and we cheer and pay them a pretty penny for the privilege.) Gary Sinise's unsmiling performance as Lieutenant Dan is possibly the closest the movie gets to, say, a Coming Home - while also yielding the sharp aside "someone from his family died in every single American war": actual irreverence, informed by a knowledge of the agonies America has continually inflicted on itself. And - much as any of us may want to razz the character, and what he does and doesn't stand for - Hanks makes Forrest both funny and a sweetheart. Even with all this skill in its favour, Gump still makes you gulp, shift uneasily or otherwise scratch your head: it's a film that sets a late, notionally uplifting montage to Jackson Browne's "Running on Empty", as if it liked the harmonies but didn't notice the title or lyrics. It remains a profoundly American text, in that it contains multitudes and contradicts itself as it goes; that it became a four-quadrant hit worldwide remains a baffler. Returning to Gump in 2024, I realised this was Not My Film, but my parents' generation trying to collectively work something out while their credit and faculties remained intact. Still, if you wanted to teach wide-eyed film students how even dumb-looking, dumb-sounding Hollywood product can stir up vastly different emotions and reactions, stick this one on. It'll certainly get them talking. As with Forrest's running, they may never stop.

Forrest Gump is now showing in cinemas nationwide, and streaming via Netflix.