The Best Picture Winner of 1994 brought Tom Hanks his second Oscar in a row, and held the top spot at the box office for a remarkable 10 weeks. “Run, Forrest! Run!” became an unlikely catchphrase. And the talking heads were heard debating whether “Forrest Gump” was a celebration of conservative or liberal values.
At the time, I loved that the movie had inspired such debate. The conservative crowd pointed out that Forrest’s beloved Jenny, in her relentless pursuit of pleasures of the flesh, was left with an incurable disease (AIDS, presumably, though the movie never explicitly confirms this assumption). Liberals pointed out the compassion Forrest showed his Jenny upon hearing of her disease was confirmation of the film’s liberal message.
The flaw in this liberal point of view is that it sees the conservative take on Jenny’s life as lacking in compassion. It confuses the problem with the solution. The conservative take is rooted in fact: Jenny did run around, take drugs, sleep with any swinging Dick who would have her. Pointing out Forrest’s heroic compassion to her situation doesn’t erase the reality of how she got in the situation to begin with.
It’s a conservative movie, no question about it.
Neither Jenny nor Forrest experience an easy childhood. Forrest has a spine as “crooked as a politician” leaving him confined to leg braces. Jenny has an abusive father. It turns out that Forrest has an uncanny ability to run, which gets him into college on a football scholarship. Did Bear Bryant’s compassion to Forrest’s academic deficiencies stem from a liberal mindset? I doubt it. Winning ballgames subbing in for the profit motive led to Bryant’s decision. Jenny, too, goes to college, and has dreams of being a big star. Whether she pursues these dreams to the fullest extent of her abilities is unclear, but their derailment appears to be the result of her inability to get out of her own way. Oh, and she picks bad men, including one abusive lout who calls Forrest, the Vietnam Vet, a “Babykiller.” He also badmouths a Democrat, Lyndon B. Johnson, but still, something tells me homeboy didn’t cast a vote for Nixon.
After Vietnam, Forrest holds true to his word and buys a shrimping boat. But, lo and behold, shrimping is not as easy as returning kickoffs for the Tide. Does Forrest quit? Or wallow? He works harder, and an act of God helps him to become successful in the shrimping business. So, he blows all his money on booze and hookers and hires Van Halen to perform at his birthday party – no wait. With the help of his friend, Lieutenant Dan (Gary Sinise, who was nominated for an Academy Award), he invests the money and becomes rich.
Obviously, “Forrest Gump” is a fable, not to be taken literally. Forrest is a simpleton whose values run deep. For much of the film, Forrest lacks self-awareness. He treats people the way he wants to be treated, and doesn’t expect anything from anyone. When a Drill Sergeant asks why he disassembled a rifle so quickly, his response, “Because you told me to, Drill Sergeant,” sounds almost like a question. What other reason would he do it?
The result of this lack of self-awareness is a character that doesn’t feel real for much of the film. But there is a moment, when Jenny rejects him for the forty-eleventh time, when he says, “I’m not a smart man, but I do know what love is.” His self-awareness surfaces again when he learns he has a son. Choking back tears, his voice trails off before he can finish asking if the boy is stupid like him. I think that without these two scenes, the movie would not have enjoyed as much success or raked in the Oscars.
In these moments we connect with Forrest, the conservative hero of the movie.
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