2024-04-18 03:01:00
Sex. Psychedelia. Political assassinations. Racial riots. The Vietnam war. High speed ping pong. Seafood trade. Forrest Gump I had it all. The 1994 film was one of the most unlikely box office hits of its time, an epic spanning several decades that combines the portentous with extreme whim. Its charming and cartoonishly benevolent protagonist became the emblematic role of Tom Hanks. The script phrases (“¡Corre, Forrest, corre!” y “Life is like a box of chocolates”) They came into common use. However, despite having been a box office success and having won six Oscars (for best director, best actor and best film), Forrest Gump go on polarizing the opinions.
Even during its original release, some critics couldn’t resist throwing stones at him with the same brutal glee as the Alabama schoolchildren who treat young Forrest so abhorrently at the beginning of the film. “Desolate and full of saccharine”, “reactionary” and “childish stupidity turned into feel-good doping” were some of the more caustic comments made against the film.
Its screenwriter, Eric Roth, and its director, Robert Zemeckis, were criticized for having removed all the satirical bite from the Winston Groom novel on which it was based. Detractors were horrified that a film they found so bland and ersatz will steal the spotlight from Quentin Tarantino at the 1995 Academy Awards, having overwhelmed Pulp Fiction in several important categories.
But three decades later, Forrest Gump (which will be re-released in theaters for its 30th anniversary on July 19) remains as lively and bold as ever. His story, which follows a man who survives a lifetime of trauma to become a winner American that is inserted into the history books at every moment, is unlike any other. Gradually wear away residual cynicism, as if one were one of those distrustful spectators who end up being conquered by Forrest’s rantings.
Forrest Gump begins with a moment of cinematic bravery. A feather floats through the streets of Savannah, Georgia, and ends up landing at the feet of a man in a white suit and worn-out sneakers who is sitting on a bench next to a bus stop. This is Forrest Gump. He opens his carefully packed suitcase and takes out his copy of the children’s book. Curious George and places the pen between its pages. He then starts talking to a stranger and offers her a chocolate.
He director of photography Don Burgess, Oscar nominee, says he used “a crane on top of a crane” to film the plume as it floated between trees and houses. He remembers that the first time he read the script “I loved its whimsical quality,” but he also realized that would be a “daunting challenge to carry out.” Forrest Gump is full of moments like this opening sequence: captivating and poetic, but difficult to understand.
The history it’s not so original as some fans might suspect. In Zelig (1983), from Woody Allen, there also appeared a chameleon character at crucial moments in history. The film is also inspired by from the garden (1979), from Hal Ashby, starring Peter Sellers in the role of a simple gardener who becomes a political guru.
Even so, at first the studies were bewildered that someone would want to make such an unconventional film. Producer Wendy Finerman (who spent almost a decade trying to raise the necessary funds) declared to The New York Times in a 1994 interview: “Actors, directors, agents and studio people “They were not interested in the project.”. They all thought that the public who had already seen Rain Man (1988), starring Dustin Hoffman in the role of an “autistic savant”, I wouldn’t want to see another movie with what we would now call a neurodivergent protagonist.
His misgivings were partly shared by the cast and crew. “Is anyone going to be interested in this movie? This guy sitting on a bench, with these ridiculous shoes, this little white suit, with a suitcase full of books? Curious George? Are we doing anything here that’s going to make any sense to anyone?” Hanks told The New Yorker, remembering his feelings at the time of filming.
Given its scope, the film was made on a relatively modest budget: about 50 million dollars. “Most of the time we worked six days a week. Sundays became ‘Let’s shoot some’ day,” says the cinematographer, recalling the dizzying schedule and all the weekend overtime.
Gump goes from the east coast to the west and passes through many places in between. The filmmakers didn’t fake those scenes. They went with him everywhere, from the Santa Monica Pier to the Maine Lighthouse, from Montana to Wyoming. “It was a logistical nightmare to organize everything,” Burgess recalls.
When it finally appeared in theaters, Forrest Gump may have divided opinions, but everyone went to see her. The film achieved an astonishing worldwide gross of close to 700 million dollars, surpassing the The Avengers, Jurassic World y Black Panther in their inflation-adjusted income.
“My mother always said that life was like a box of chocolates… you never know what you’re going to get,” Gump says to the stranger at the beginning of the film, who does her best to ignore him. Screenwriter Roth was inspired by the initial phrase from Groom’s novel: “Let me say this: being an idiot is not a box of chocolates.”
The Gump in the novel is very different from the one that appears on the screen. In the book, it is a figure self-aware which stands in the long tradition of the wise idiot (from Shakespeare’s Fool in The Lear King to Boo Radley in Kill a Mockingbird). He is a big, rude man who swears constantly and has a lot of sex.
In the film, irony and artifice disappear completely. Played by Hanks, Forrest is a holy innocent with a naivety reminiscent of silent film comedians like Charlie Chaplin o Buster Keaton. Certain sequences could have come straight from one of his films, such as his moment of glory at a college football game, when he runs to score a goal. touchdown but then he keeps going, speeding out of the stadium.
The filmmaker had somehow transformed a satirical novel, full of sex and politics, into a public success familiar. The love story was crucial in the process. The moment little Jenny offers him a seat on the school bus, Forrest is instantly smitten. They get along as well as “peas and carrots.” She becomes his obsession forever.
Robin Wright, who played Jenny as an adult, recently told the host Jimmy Fallon what Forrest Gump It was the only moment in his career when he knew there was “nailed” an audition. At the time she was pregnant, she felt “down to earth” and she had a “great connection” with Hanks From the beginning. Her romance gave a narrative line to a film that might otherwise have seemed haphazardly structured.
But in Forrest Gump there has always been a darkness which belies his reputation for sickly sweetness. The film is full of death, grief and extreme loneliness. Jenny is also caught up in the turmoil of the times. As Forrest dodges gunfire and rescues wounded soldiers on the Vietnam battlefield, she is immersed in the civil rights movement and at the center of the counterculture. He takes drugs and is on the verge of suicide. His experiences are a twisted reflection of what Forrest suffers. Abused by her farmer’s father as a child, beaten by her boyfriend, she represents the lowest side of the American dream.
Forrest Gump is also a buddy movie old-fashioned, another reason why so many people liked it. The relationship between Gump and Lieutenant Dan Taylor (Gary Sinise), the army officer whose legs are blown off in Vietnam, is very similar to that between the small but cunning George and the giant and neurodivergent Lennie in John Steinbeck’s novel Of mice and men (In fact, Sinise had directed and starred in a film adaptation of the book a year earlier).
Cinematographer Burgess recalls that the team “was fell in love of Forrest Gump when we were making the movie, but you never have any idea if the same thing is going to happen to the audience.” Three decades later, it’s not difficult to find out what gives the film its strange power. The magic lies in the confidence with which the filmmakers conjured an optimistic folk tale from such bleak material.
The public’s enduring affection for Forrest Gump may be revived with the release of the new movie Here later this year, which reunites director Zemeckis, stars Hanks and Wright, and screenwriter Roth. The new film is a family drama based on the graphic novel by Richard McGuire, in which Hanks and Wright play a couple who get married and raise their children. Burgess was again the director of photography, but warns the public that don’t wait a second Forrest Gump. “The creative team is back together, but it has its own story,” he says.
As for poor Forrest, there are still plenty of people who Can not stand it, while others continue to consider him one of the greatest heroes of nineties cinema. He may not be a smart man, but he knows what love is. You have to be very grumpy to reject it.
* Of The Independent From great britain. Special for Page 12.