Forrest Gump Review

Nobody should pretend this does not work. Zemeckis is one of the great mechanics of American cinema and the construction here is close to flawless, from the feather to the composited newsreels to Alan Silvestri's piano figure doing more emotional labor than the script. Tom Hanks plays Forrest without a shred of irony, which is the only way the part survives, and Sally Field and Gary Sinise both make far more of thin material than it deserves.

Robin Wright has the hardest job in the film and is not helped by it. The problem is what the movie is arguing. History happens to Forrest and never touches him, while Jenny, who engages with the same decades deliberately, is punished for it in a way the film treats as tragic rather than as its own doing. That is a worldview, and it is a mean one dressed as sweetness. Taken as a machine for producing feeling it is superbly built and genuinely moving in places. Taken as a statement about the country it describes, it is comfort food that flatters passivity.