Forrest Gump

The Feather and the Storm

Thirty years on, people still argue about Forrest Gump like the movie owes them a final ruling. For some, Robert Zemeckis’s 1994 epic is warm Americana. For others, it’s a slick fantasy that pats obedience on the head and sneers at the counterculture.

Watching it again, I cared less about either camp than about the film’s stubborn resistance to cynicism. Strip away the culture-war noise and what remains is a story about a man who moves through history without trying to conquer it.

Zemeckis has always loved the nuts and bolts of filmmaking. Here he uses early digital effects to slide Forrest into footage with JFK and John Lennon, but the bolder move is making the whole sprawling movie hang on a man at a bus stop. Tom Hanks reportedly wondered during production whether anybody would care about "this nut sitting on a bench".

That doubt turns out to be the engine. The film keeps smashing the stillness of that bench against the violent sprawl of the American century, and the contrast gives the whole thing its pulse.