Jeremy’s Tophunder №50: Forrest Gump

9 min readMay 8, 2020

Forrest Gump was my favorite movie for a decent chunk of time. It was back when I was in high school (and possibly into early college), and I loved it so much because it seemed like a movie that really had all of the things that a movie should aspire to have. It was funny, it was dramatic, it had romance, it was well-shot, it had some cool action sequences, it delivers some great emotional moments (both positive and negative), and it has an ending that partially subverts your expectations.

Over the last 10 years or so, it’s dropped down the list a little bit. It definitely has moments that are corny and saccharine, and it seems happy to be that way. There are a handful of moments where the filmmakers could have taken a deeper look at some darker moments (specifically in Jenny’s storyline), but they chose to mostly gloss over those.

It’s something I go back and forth on. More often than not, I prefer movies that take as realistic a look as possible at whatever story they’re telling, instead of looking at everything through rose-colored glasses. But here, I think it might be okay for a few reasons. First of all, there’s nothing inherently wrong with making a heartwarming, feel-good movie. More than that, though, the story is told entirely through the lens of Forrest Gump, a simple-minded but kind-hearted guy who is telling the story of all the things that have happened in his life. We’re going to stay on the surface, because that’s where Forrest’s mental handicap keeps him most of the time.

In a strange, roundabout way, it makes for a complicated movie. The plot is trying to stay true to what Forrest knows and can feel, but it actually undermines part of the Jenny storyline. A lot of people have a negative opinion of Jenny, thinking that she was a bad friend to Forrest, who only wanted to show her his love. I don’t think that view is entirely fair. I think Jenny Gump is one of the most misunderstood characters in movie history.

One of the best explanations I’ve ever seen is actually from an AskReddit thread on this very subject (the most misunderstood characters in movies). It’s from a user with the screenname Namtara, and I’ll paraphrase a few parts of it here. (I’m not going to link it, because it’s written more abrasively than I’d like to share, but if you want to find the original text, you can type a few of the keywords above into a search engine and you’ll probably find it.)

Jenny is the victim of sexual abuse at the hands of her father. She says that Forrest doesn’t know what love is, but it’s actually Jenny herself that doesn’t understand love. She thinks that showing Forrest the kind of love that he’s hoping for would be taking advantage of him, similar to how her father abused her. Forrest is the only person that ever truly loved her, and he’s mentally handicapped. She has a number of relationships (some of which we see on screen), and it seems like all of them are physically abusive. But Jenny thinks that’s what love is, because they aren’t forcing her to have sex with them. And because she thinks Forrest is too simple-minded to see that these guys really do love her, she thinks that Forrest doesn’t know what love is. That’s the reason she splits after sleeping with Forrest — she thinks she made a mistake. She thinks allowing herself to feel genuine love for Forrest is wrong, because it puts her in a position to take advantage of him, the same way that she’s been taken advantage of her entire life. It’s only much later, after getting her head on straight (probably largely because of her son) that she realizes that Forrest has been the right guy for her all along. She doesn’t realize until it’s almost too late that love isn’t complicated, it’s simple. It’s not something you have to explain and define, it’s something you have to feel. Jenny has received a lot of criticism over the years, but I think she’s actually the most sympathetic character in the movie.

Love is one of the weirdest things that human beings do. It’s something that most people have an incredibly hard time describing, but everybody knows what it feels like. Even if you look up clinical and academic definitions of what love is, they feel woefully inadequate. Movies that are “about” love are often dismissed as infantile and less than, which kind of seems strange to me, because love is such an integral and universal part of being human. I certainly take issues with movies that depict love in willfully unrealistic ways, like [gestures at just about every romantic comedy ever], but even when it’s done well, it’s criticized as overly sentimental.

There’s a common theme in many kinds of art, where the artist’s motivation should be to hold a mirror up to the world, or society, or whatever. The idea is mostly that the mirror is supposed to show us the inconvenient truths — the parts of the world that we’d rather not see. A lot of postmodern filmmaking used the mirror to show the dark and seedy parts of the world, in direct response to the era that preceded it. Those motivations have been just about fully adopted into the mainstream, so much so that even superhero movies (normally a very black and white, good vs. evil story) have begun making an effort to place their stories within a more dark, gritty context, and establish both their heroes and villains as complex, multi-faceted, and sometimes even morally ambiguous. But I think something that gets lost in this idea is that a lot of the time, the mirror is going to show us things we do want to see.

Forrest Gump gives us a realistic depiction of love, if not a realistic depiction of life. Forrest’s impossibly serendipitous path certainly gets a bit ridiculous at times, but part of it is sold by his aw-shucks-modesty, and part of it is sold by the undercurrent of his relationship with Jenny — the idea that these are just things that happened to him, and none of it is really all that important compared to how he feels about her.

Along the way, there are a few parts that feel sincere, and a few parts that feel hokey. His experiences in Vietnam and everything that shoots off of that tree feel real to me. He would be the kind of guy that runs back into the jungle 10 times, trying to find his friend, and saving half his platoon in the process. He would be the kind of guy that would make good on his word to Bubba and buy a shrimp boat. He would be the kind of guy to welcome Lieutenant Dan to come aboard as his first mate. He’s loyal to the people around him and he’s a man of his word. I buy all of that. Becoming an internationally renowned Ping Pong player? Running across the country non-stop for three years? Those don’t quite get my stamp of approval.

While Hanks obviously got the lion’s share of the recognition for his performance, I was just as impressed with Robin Wright, Gary Sinise, and Mykelti Williamson. Really, I think Sinise gives the best performance in the movie, particularly in the scene where he yanks Forrest out of bed in the military hospital, and in the scene where he challenges God in the middle of a hurricane. Lt. Dan has, for my money, the most compelling arc of any character, starting out as an officer in the army, becoming despondent when he feels his destiny has been robbed from him, falling into an even deeper depression as a handicapped veteran in New York, before starting to finally turn it around when he joins Forrest in the shrimp business. Dan’s redemption — making his peace with God, then arriving at Forrest’s wedding with “magic legs” and a fiancee is probably the most satisfying conclusion for any character, and I really appreciated it.

Forrest Gump is also one of the rare movies that stands out for both its original score and its soundtrack. Plenty have movies with scores that stay with you, and many movies have soundtracks of popular songs that fit seamlessly into the story. It’s rare for a movie to have both, but Forrest Gump does. The soundtrack is an incredible double album of folk and classic rock hits, and might as well have been my own personal mixtape in high school and college. Just about all of the songs are perfectly chosen and perfectly placed. It has that in common with other movies that I’ve written about here, like Remember the Titans and Dazed and Confused. What Forrest Gump does to go above and beyond was also feature an iconic musical score from Alan Silvestri. Maybe I’ve seen the movie too many times, but it’s easy for me to pick out different pieces of the score and easily connect them to the scene they’re from.

I think part of the reason Forrest Gump gets a bad wrap these days is because of the 1995 Oscars. Forrest Gump cleaned up, taking Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and a few others. Normally that wouldn’t mean much one way or the other, but when you consider the other movies that were eligible that year — namely The Shawshank Redemption and Pulp Fiction — it’s going to lead to some disagreements. Did Forrest Gump deserve to win Best Picture in 1995? Probably not — of those three movies, I think it’s probably the worst one, and the one that ranks lowest on this list. But just because it won awards it probably didn’t deserve doesn’t make it a bad movie.

Forrest Gump used to be my favorite movie. It’s certainly not anymore, but I still have a lot of strong feelings about the movie. The time in my life when it was my favorite was right before I really started to fall in love with movies. I had always liked movies, but I didn’t really put a ton of thought into what makes a movie good or bad. There were just movies I liked, and movies I didn’t like. By the time I got to college, I had started to force myself to think with the mindset that the “best” movies should be my favorite movies, and that lasted for a little while. There was a time in my life where I tried really hard to convince myself that Casablanca was my favorite movie. By 2020, I’ve basically come full circle — the movies I like are the movies I like, and there aren’t hard-and-fast rules about why I like certain movies but not others. I can tell the difference between “movies I think are great movies” and “movies I like to watch,” which I never really had a great grasp on until the last few years. Obviously there’s some overlap, but there’s a lot of contrast as well. Forrest Gump isn’t as good of a movie that I used to think it was, and I don’t love it quite as much as I used to. But for a movie that was my favorite for a good portion of my life, and had a big impact on who I was and who I was trying to be during that time period, I couldn’t drop it any lower than №50.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

15. Skyfall

17. Ocean’s 11

18. Air Force One