Forest Gump (film)
Forrest Gump is a 1994 American comedy-drama film. Based on the novel of the same name by Winston Groom, the film was directed by Robert Zemeckis and starred Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Gary Sinise, and Sally Field. The story depicts several decades in the life of Forrest Gump, an Alabama native suffering from mild mental disability. That does not prevent him from being a privileged witness, and in some cases a decisive actor, of many of the most transcendental moments in the history of the United States in the second half of the century XX, specifically between 1945 and 1982.
The film differs substantially from the novel on which it is based, among other things in the protagonist's own personality and in the various events in which he is involved. Filming took place in 1993, mainly in the US states of Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina. Numerous visual effects were used to integrate the protagonist into actual historical footage and recreate other scenes. On the soundtrack, the film includes numerous songs typical of each era that are portrayed in it, a musical compilation that was a complete success in its commercial release as an album thanks to eight million copies sold worldwide.
Premiered in the United States on July 6, 1994, Forrest Gump received praise from specialized critics and was a great success with the public, becoming the second highest grossing film of the year in North America., behind only The Lion King, and grossed $677 million worldwide. The film was awarded the Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director (Robert Zemeckis), Best Actor (Tom Hanks), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Special Effects, and Best Editing. He received numerous other nominations and awards, including Golden Globes, People's Choice Awards, and Young Artist Awards. In 2011 the United States Library of Congress selected Forrest Gump for preservation in the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Plot
While sitting at a bus stop, Forrest Gump begins recounting his life story to various strangers sitting next to him. His narration begins in childhood, when he had to wear orthopedic devices on his legs, which caused bullying and ridicule from other children. He lived with his mother in a house in the country where they rented rooms. There Forrest taught one of the guests, a young Elvis Presley, to dance in a peculiar way that he would later make world famous. On the school bus on his first day of school, Forrest meets Jenny, with whom he immediately falls in love and with whom he becomes best friends with him. Also in his childhood, Forrest discovers that he is capable of running very fast, an ability that impresses football coach Bear Bryant and allows him to enter the University of Alabama, despite his slight mental retardation. There he witnesses the Parade at the School Gate starring George Wallace in 1963. At that time he is also selected for the All-America football team and meets President John F. Kennedy in person at the White House.
After graduating college, Forrest enlists in the United States Army, where he becomes close friends with Benjamin Buford "Bubba" Blue, an African-American with whom he agrees to try his hand at the fishing business in the future. of prawns. Both are sent to the Vietnam War and while there Forrest realizes that Jenny appears in an issue of the erotic magazine Playboy. When his squad falls into an ambush, Forrest manages to save, thanks to his fast run, numerous colleagues, including Lieutenant Dan Taylor, but he cannot prevent the death of his friend Bubba. Forrest himself is wounded in the action in which he is awarded the Purple Heart, but his bravery is recognized with the Medal of Honor, presented to him in person by President Lyndon B. Johnson. While in the hospital recovering from his war wound, Gump again meets Lieutenant Dan, who has lost both legs and is furious with him for saving him instead of letting him face his fate: to die on the battlefield the same way. than all his ancestors. In Washington, D.C., Forrest is caught up in a huge anti-war demonstration on the National Mall, where he meets up with Jenny, then part of the Hippie counterculture movement. They both spend the night walking through the capital, but the next morning she leaves with her boyfriend.
At that time Forrest discovered his great ability in the practice of table tennis and began playing for the United States Army team, with which he ended up competing against the Chinese team during a goodwill tour to the Asian country. He revisits the White House, where he meets President Richard Nixon. Later staying at the Watergate Hotel, one night Forrest inadvertently helps expose the Watergate scandal. Thanks to his already numerous exploits, Gump is invited to a famous television show, in which he coincides with John Lennon, and after which he runs into his former lieutenant Dan Taylor, who now lives on a government pension. Dan despises Forrest's plans to get into the shrimping business and mockingly promises that he will be his first mate on the boat if he succeeds in that venture.
Using the money he earned playing ping-pong, Forrest buys a fishing boat he names Jenny, beginning to fulfill a promise he made to his friend Bubba, who died in Vietnam. The handicapped Dan also keeps his promise and shows up to help Forrest in the business. At first they have no luck shrimping, but thanks to the devastating effects of Hurricane Carmen, which destroys Forrest's boat's entire competing fishing fleet, the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company makes a huge profit.. Dan finally thanks Gump for saving him from death in the war. So Forrest returns home to care for his sick mother, who dies of cancer shortly after. The fishing business had been left in the hands of Lieutenant Dan, who wisely invests the profits in shares of the Apple computer company and makes them both millionaires.
Jenny returns to visit Forrest and stays with him for a while, which he takes advantage of to propose to her. She refuses and ends up leaving one morning, before he wakes up. Distraught, Gump decides to start running and what at first was only going to be a few kilometers ends up becoming a very long marathon from coast to coast of the country that lasts three years, in the course of which he becomes a celebrity and attracts numerous followers. One day he suddenly stops his career and decides to return home. There he receives a letter from Jenny in which he asks him to meet her, which leads him to the bus stop where we see him at the beginning of the film. Back at Jenny's house, she reveals that they have a son together, also named Forrest, and that she is sick with an unknown virus. She proposes to him and he accepts. The three return to Forrest's home in Alabama and plan a small wedding attended by Lieutenant Dan, already engaged and with new titanium alloy legs. Jenny and Forrest marry, but she dies soon after. In the last scene of the film, Forrest and his son wait at the school bus stop on the boy's first day of school. As the bus pulls away, Forrest Sr. sits on the same tree stump that his mother did the first day he went to school and watches the flight of a feather, the same one that appears at the beginning.
Cast
- Tom Hanks like Forrest Gump. As a child he was detected by an intellectual quotient less than 75, but his or her inward character and the great devotion he professes to his mother and to his duty in life will lead him to numerous and interesting life experiences. During his life he knows many important characters and is immersed in outstanding historical events. The first choice of filmmakers for this role was actor John Travolta, who years later has come to admit that not accepting it was a mistake. Bill Murray was also considered for the role. Hanks has revealed that he agreed to participate after spending an hour and a half reading the script. In principle his idea was to give Forrest an accent from the south of the United States, but director Robert Zemeckis finally convinced him to speak with the strong accent described in the book. Also, Hanks put as a condition to work on the film that was very accurate in the historical portrait. The Forrest boy was played by Michael Conner Humphreys, an actor who spoke with a particular accent that Hanks claims he came to imitate in the talk of the adult Forrest.
- Robin Wright as Jenny Curran. A childhood friend and great love of Forrest throughout her life. She suffered sexual abuse by her father as a child and led a life entirely different from that of Forrest, a self-destructive existence in which she passed through the movement hippie of the 1960s and drug addiction in the '70s and '80s. He just worked as a waitress in Savannah, Georgia, where he lives in an apartment with his son. He finally married Forrest, but died shortly after he married a victim of an unknown virus. Hanna Hall interprets the Jenny girl.
- Gary Sinise like Lieutenant Dan Taylor. Leader of the Forrest and Bubba platoon in the Vietnam War, all his ancestors died in battle heroically. After losing his legs for the wounds sustained in an ambush of the Vietcong, he initially reproachs Forrest to have saved his life and falls into a great depression. Time later he will join Gump on his shrimp fishing boat, whose success will return the desire to live and finally thank Forrest for rescuing him in the war. At the end of the film we see him married and modern orthopedic legs that allow him to walk again.
- Mykelti Williamson as Benjamin Buford "Bubba" Blue. Forrest's best friend in the army, his idea is to set up a shrimp fishing company. He dies in Vietnam, but Gump and Lieutenant Dan set up the company, which carries his name, with enormous success. His mother received the gains that would have belonged to him and thus brought out all his family from poverty. Williamson had to use a lip prosthesis to create the lower lip of Bubba throughout the shooting. The role was also offered to actors David Alan Grier, Ice Cube and Dave Chappelle, but they all rejected it. The latter thought the film was going to be a failure, but he ended up admitting it was a mistake not to accept it.
- Sally Field as Mrs. Gump. Mother of Forrest, raise your child alone after the father leaves them both. Field said about the character of this mother: "She is a woman who loves her son unconditionally... Many of her dialogues with her son sound like slogans, which is what she wants."
- Haley Joel Osment as Forrest Gump Jr. Son of Forrest and Jenny. Osment was the chosen child after the casting director saw him in a Pizza Hut announcement.
- Peter Dobson like Elvis Presley. Guest at Forrest's. Although it does not appear in the credits, his voice is that of actor Kurt Russell.
- Dick Cavett himself. Cavett interprets himself in the 1970s, made up to rejuvenate several decades. It is thus the only known character who makes a cameo in the film without resorting to archive images.
- Sam Anderson as director Hancock. Director of Forrest College.
- Geoffrey Blake as Wesley. Jenny's abusive boyfriend.
- Siobhan Fallon Hogan like Dorothy Harris. Conductor of the school bus in which both Forrest father and Forrest son are assembled.
- Sonny Shroyer as coach Paul "Bear" Bryant. Forrest American Football Coach at Alabama University.
- Grand L. Bush, Conor Kennelly and Teddy Lane Jr. as the Black Panthers. Members of an organization protesting the Vietnam War, President Lyndon B. Johnson and against racism.
Production
Script
"The screenwriter, Eric Roth, got away from the book. We turned the two elements of the novel, giving preeminence to the love story about fantastic stories. In addition, the book was more cynical and cold than the film. In the film Gump is a completely decent character, always true to his word. He has no prejudice or opinion on anything other than Jenny, his mother or God." — Director Robert Zemeckis |
The film is based on Winston Groom's 1986 novel of the same name. Both focus on Forrest Gump, but the film essentially recreates the first eleven chapters of the book, then jumps to the end of the novel, to the creation of the Bubba Gump fishing company and the meeting between father and son. In addition to omitting some parts of Groom's novel, the film adds some situations to Forrest's life that do not appear in the book, such as the leg braces he wears as a child or his three-year long marathon throughout United States. Forrest's personality and character are not the same in the film and in the book, as in the second Gump is a highly educated autistic who fails crafts and gymnastics while at university but receives excellent grades in physics, some classes to which his coach points him in order to satisfy the requirements of the university. In the novel, Gump is also an astronaut, a professional wrestler, and a chess player, but none of these appear in the film. Regarding the choice of director, the producers offered the filmmaker's position to two filmmakers before casting Robert Zemeckis: Terry Gilliam he did not accept, and Barry Sonnenfeld declined to direct The Addams Family: The Tradition Continues in his place.
Shooting
Filming on Forrest Gump began in August 1993 and ended four months later, in December of the same year. Although most of the film takes place in Alabama, filming took place essentially in Beaufort, South Carolina, as well as some coastal areas of Virginia and North Carolina. The scene of Forrest running through the Vietnamese jungle while escaping from Vietcong fire was shot on Fripp Island, South Carolina. scenes were recreated at the Biltmore house in Asheville and along the Blue Ridge Parkway near Boone, both in North Carolina. Another filming location, the road through the Grandfather Mountain Conservancy in North Carolina, now has a stretch called "Forrest Gump Curve". The Gump family home and Jenny's childhood home they were built near the Combahee River, in the vicinity of Yemassee, South Carolina. Very close to there, some scenes from Vietnam were also filmed, for whose recreation twenty palm trees had to be planted. It is also worth noting that the bus stop where Forrest Gump tells his story is in Chippewa Square in Savannah, Georgia. Some scenes were also filmed in the outskirts of this city: on the Houlihan Bridge in Port Wentworth and on West Bay Street in Savannah itself. For its part, most of the scenes on the university campus were filmed at the University of the South of California in Los Angeles.
Visual effects
The many visual effects in the film are the work of Ken Ralston and his team at Industrial Light & Magic. The use of computer animation techniques made it possible to insert Forrest Gump into archival footage alongside long-defunct historical figures, with whom he even shakes hands. To achieve this, Tom Hanks was first filmed in front of blue backgrounds on which they placed reference markers that then helped align the actor in the right place within the archive images. The voices of the historical figures were recorded separately with actors of dubbing, but to achieve lip synchronization in the new dialogues, the movements of the mouths of the historical figures had to be digitally modified.
In one scene from the Vietnam War, Forrest drags Bubba away from an imminent napalm bombing attack. To get the scene, first some specialists composed the movements and then Hanks was filmed running with Williamson on his back, the latter hanging from a cable to facilitate Hanks's career carrying his weight. The explosion was then filmed on location, after which both takes were digitally stitched together. Bomber planes and napalm bombs were also added digitally.
Lt. Dan's amputated legs were also achieved using digital techniques, an effect achieved by wrapping his legs in blue cloth, a color that then made it easy to remove the severed limbs frame by frame. When Lieutenant Dan appears in a wheelchair, the actor is sitting on his own lap.
The scene where Forrest intervenes in the large peace rally on the National Mall in Washington and meets Jenny also required special effects to recreate a gathering of many thousands of people. 1,500 extras were used over two days of filming. On each take, the group of extras would move to a different quadrant until the space was filled. Then, with the help of computers, all these shots were stitched together, creating the impression of seeing a crowd of several hundred thousand people.
Soundtrack
On July 6, 1994, the compilation of the 32 musical themes that sound during the film was put on sale. With the exception of the original suite that Alan Silvestri composed for the film, all of the songs had already been released years or decades earlier and were well-known themes representative of the various eras portrayed in the film. Thus, in the selection there are songs by Elvis Presley, Fleetwood Mac, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Aretha Franklin, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Three Dog Night, The Byrds, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, The Mamas & the Papas, The Doobie Brothers, Simon & Garfunkel, Bob Seger, Buffalo Springfield or Michael McDonald among others. Music producer Joel Sill stated that with this compilation "we wanted to have very recognizable material that would underscore the different eras, but we didn't want it to interfere with what was happening cinematically". The two-disc album contains a variety of music from the years 50 to 80, all American musicians. According to Sills, this was a request from Robert Zemeckis: «All the material is American. Bob (Zemeckis) insisted on it. He thought Forrest wouldn't buy anything that wasn't American."
The soundtrack reached number two in the Billboard magazine ranking, sold twelve million copies, and is one of the best-selling music albums in the United States. The original soundtrack for the film was composed and conducted by Alan Silvestri, Zemeckis' regular musical collaborator, and released on August 2, 1994.
Spanish dubbing
To get the film in Spanish, two dubbings were made: one for distribution in Spain and another for Latin America. In the first case, the process was carried out in the Sonoblok studio in the Spanish city of Barcelona. The cast was made up of Jordi Brau (as Forrest Gump), Vicky Peña (Jenny Curran), Pere Molina (Dan Taylor), Alfonso Vallés (for "Buba" Blue), Concha García Valero (in the role of Forrest's mother, Mrs. Gump), David Jenner (young Forrest Gump), Sergio Zamora (Elvis Presley), Salvador Vives (Dick Cavett), Ricky Coello (as Principal Hancock), Albero Mieza (Wesley), María Dolores Gispert (Dorothy Harris), Juan Carlos Gustems (in the role of coach Paul Bryant) and Antonio Lara (for the voice of "Black Panther").
For its part, in the Spanish-American version, recorded in the US city of Los Angeles, the main cast of voices was made up of Leonardo Araujo (for dubbing Forrest Gump), Angelines Santana (for Jenny Curran), Roberto Colucci (Dan Taylor), Rocío Robledo (Mrs. Gump), Alex Araujo (for the voice of Forrest when he was little), Jorge García (Dick Cavett), Juan Cuadra (as Principal Hancock), Víctor Mares Jr. (Wesley) and finally Yvette González (in the role of Dorothy Harris).
Reception
Criticism
Anglo-Saxon and other countries
Forrest Gump has generally received very good reviews. The review compilation website Rotten Tomatoes shows that 71% of a total of 106 opinions on the film are positive and that the average score given is 7.5 out of 10. On the Metacritic website, which uses a rating system typified unity, Zemeckis's film earns a favorable rating of 82 out of 100 based on opinions from major critics.
Many critics praised the film's original story. In the United States, the prestigious Roger Ebert, of the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper, wrote in his day: «I have not come across anyone like Forrest Gump in any previous film, in fact I had not seen a film as Forrest Gump. Any attempt to describe it will risk making the film seem more conventional than it actually is, but I'll try. It's a comedy, I think. Or maybe a drama. Or a dream... Eric Roth's screenplay has the complexity of a modern fiction... Hanks's performance strikes an impressive balance between comedy and sadness, in a story rich with humor and silent truths... it's a magical movie." Todd McCarthy of Variety wrote that the film "is well crafted on every level and achieves the difficult feat of being an intimate and even delicate tale with a light touch against an epic backdrop". Political scientist Joe Paskett believes this film is "one of the best of all time". On the other hand, Forrest Gump was disliked by several major critics. Anthony Lane of The New Yorker called it "Tempered, cautious and boring as hell". to a virtual reality theme park: a baby boomer version of Disney's America". Pauline Kael simply says of the film that she "had the hell out of it".
In the British newspaper The Guardian , Dereck Malcolm reported that "not even those connected with the film had the remotest idea of the success that this strange parable was expecting, which launches a wise idiot in recent American history, and he becomes a full-fledged American hero." Also from the UK, on the Moviefarm.co.uk website, critic Naomi Barnwell simply remarks that "...the story is nothing short of charming."
Criticism was expressed in various ways about the protagonist. Gump has been compared to various fictional and real characters such as Huckleberry Finn, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan. Peter Chomo states that Forrest acts as a "social mediator and redemptive agent in times of division". Peter Travers of < i>Rolling Stone described Gump as "everything we admire in the American character: honest, loyal, courageous...". Janet Maslin of The New York Times, said in his review that Gump is "self-indulgent in his blissful ignorance... the embodiment of absolutely nothing". life in the face, but who remains thoughtful licking his fingers".
The film tends to polarize viewers' opinions, and as stated in Entertainment Weekly magazine in 2004, «almost a decade after it made money and Oscars, the ode to Robert Zemeckis to the 20th century of the United States still represents one of the most clearly drawn lines in the arena of cinema. Half the people see it as a piece of pop melodrama, while everyone else gets as excited as a box of chocolates."
Hispanic American and Spanish
In the Iberian territory, Adrián Massanet from the website Blogdecine.com, dismissed the film as "superficial and ultra-conservative". However, it had a fairly positive review in general. Ángel Fernández-Santos from the newspaper El País said that "Tom Hanks turns the most bitter thing in the history of the United States into syrup", in addition to clarifying that "the movie Forrest Gump offers a good realistic use of the electronic fantasy". It should also be noted that on the Fotogramas.es website they rated her with just 3 stars out of 5 possible but the critics of that website added that "she managed to attract attention with her overwhelming common sense in contrast to the profound crisis of society's values".
Commercial
Produced on a budget of $55 million, Forrest Gump initially opened in 1,595 theaters across the United States and grossed more than $24 million worldwide. its first weekend. The film business consultant and screenwriter Jeffrey Hilton suggested, after viewing the film in a preliminary screening, Wendy Finerman, producer of the film, to double the budget allocated to the promotion of the film. And so it was done immediately following her advice. The film topped the list of the highest-grossing films for the weekend of its release, slightly ahead of The Lion King, which had already been on the bill for a month, and it did not leave that position for ten weeks. It was in theaters for more than ten months and collected, only in the United States and Canada, 329.7 million dollars, a figure that placed it in fourth place on the list of the most popular films. box office hits in film history, behind only blockbusters such as E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial, Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope and Jurassic Park.
Forrest Gump surpassed $250 million in revenue in 66 days and was the fastest Paramount Pictures film to break the $100 million, $200 million and $300 million box office barriers. North America, Zemeckis's film grossed another $347.7 million, bringing his worldwide earnings to $677.4 million. Despite these huge earnings, the film was known as a "hit flop". because of the high fees that distributors and exhibitors took, which made Paramount lose 62 million and convinced its executives of the need to agree on less unfavorable deals.
| World premiere dates Forrest Gump |
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Awards
In addition to the awards and nominations listed below, Forrest Gump has been recognized by several prestigious American Film Institute lists. Thus, it is ranked 37th in AFI's 100 Years... 100 Inspirations, 71st in AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies, and 76th in editing. tenth anniversary of this same list. To this is added the phrase «Mom says that life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get» entered the 40th place on the AFI's 100 years... 100 phrases list. The British magazine Empire included it at number 240 on its list of the 500 best movies of all time
In December 2011, the Library of Congress of the United States selected Forrest Gump to be preserved in its National Film Registry, since in the opinion of this institution the film was "recognized for its technical innovations (the protagonist's digital insertion into old archival footage), its resonance within the culture that has elevated Gump (and all he stands for in terms of American innocence) to folk hero status, and its attempt to reconcile in both comical fashion as would be the controversial aspects of the traumatic history of his time".
| Awards won by Forrest Gump |
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Home Format
Forrest Gump was released in VHS format on April 27, 1995 and the following day the Laserdisc made up of two discs that included the report Through the Eyes of Forrest . On August 28, 2001, the DVD of the film appeared, also with two discs that included content such as director's and producer's commentary, filming footage, and screen tests. The last format the film has appeared in for home playback is the Blu-Ray, which was released in November 2009.
Controversy with the writer
Winston Groom received $350,000 for the rights to his novel Forrest Gump and signed on to receive 3% of the film's net profits. However, Paramount and the film's producers did not They paid him, relying on the peculiar Hollywood accounting system to claim that they had lost money with the hit film. In contrast, Tom Hanks agreed to enter a portion of the profits in lieu of a flat salary, earning him and director Robert Zemeckis each $40 million. Additionally, Winston Groom was never mentioned once. only once in any of the acceptance speeches given at the six Oscars with which the film was awarded.
Symbolism
The pen
“I don’t want to sound like a bad version of ‘the inner child’, but Forrest Gump’s childhood innocence is like the one we all had once. It's an emotional journey. You cry and laugh. It's what movies are supposed to get: make you feel alive."
—Wendy Finerman, producer of the film. |
Various interpretations have been given to the feather carried by the wind that appears at the beginning and end of the film. Sarah Lyall of The New York Times newspaper put together several of these explanations: “Does the white feather symbolize the unbearable lightness of being? Forrest Gump's deteriorating intellect? The randomness of experience?" Hanks interpreted that feather as follows: "Our destiny is only defined by how we handle the changes in our lives and that is what the feather embodies as it is blown by the wind. It can land anywhere and it does so at your feet. There are many theological implications". Sally Field compared the feather to fate: "The wind blows and it falls here or there. Was it planned or was it just a fluke?" Visual effects supervisor Ken Ralston compared this feather to an abstract painting: "It can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people."
The quill is found inside a book called Curious George, Forrest's favorite book because it's the one his mother read to him as a child, which connects this scene to the protagonist's childhood. Inside the book, the pen appears on top of a drawing of a monkey walking a tightrope. Whether intended or not, the image is highly symbolic. The feather also has a correlation to Jenny's constant obsession with "turning into a bird and flying far, far away" due to sexual abuse by her father. In the movie she goes so far as to say to Forrest, "If she jumped off a bridge, could she fly?"
Political interpretations
In the words of Tom Hanks, "the film is apolitical and therefore unbiased". However, in 1994 the CNN talk show Crossfire debated whether the film promoted conservative values or attacked the counterculture movement of the 1960s. Thomas Byers, in an article for Modern Fiction Studies, stated that Forrest Gump was "an aggressively conservative".
«... all over the political map have been identified with Forrest. But Forrest Gump does not treat conservative or political values. It is about humanity, about respect, tolerance and unconditional love."
- Steve Tisch, producer. |
It has been pointed out that while Gump leads a very conservative lifestyle, his friend Jenny leads a fully countercultural existence, with drug use and anti-war demonstrations, and that their final wedding could symbolize a kind of reconciliation. In an article in the Cinema Journal, Jennifer Hyland Wang argued that Jenny's death from an unknown virus "...symbolizes the death of liberal America and the death of the protests that defined the 1960s." ». She also points out that the film's screenwriter, Eric Roth, while developing the script from the novel "transferred all of Gump's flaws and all of the excesses committed by Americans in the '60s and '70s onto her [Jenny]".
Other opinions believe that the film forecasts the 1994 Republican Revolution and uses the image of Forrest Gump to promote its traditional and conservative values. Jennifer Hyland Wang notes that the film romanticizes the 1950s, as evidenced by the fact that not a single one of the "whites only" signs that were so common at the time appeared during the protagonist's childhood, and revisits the 1960s and 70 as a period of social change and confusion. He argues that this stark contrast between decades criticizes counterculture values and reaffirms conservatism, and that the film was also used by Republican politicians to illustrate "a traditionalist version of recent history" (of the United States) and to attract voters for his ideology ahead of the congressional elections. In addition, presidential candidate Bob Dole cited the film's message as an influence on his campaign because it "has made [the film] one of the biggest successes of Hollywood throughout its history: no matter how great the adversity, the American dream is within everyone's reach."
In 1995, National Review magazine included Forrest Gump in its list of “The 100 Best Conservative Movies” of All Time. Later, in 2009, this same magazine placed Zemeckis's film in fourth place among the 25 best conservative films of the last quarter of a century. "Tom Hanks plays the title lead, a friendly donkey who's too smart to embrace the lethal values of the '60s. The love of his life, wonderfully played by Robin Wright, chooses a different path: he becomes a hippie addicted to drugs with disastrous results.
Other critics see conservative readings of Forrest Gump as indicative of the death of irony in American culture. Vivian Sobchack points out that the film's humor and irony are based on the presumption of the viewers' historical self-awareness.
Possible sequel
In 2001 Eric Roth wrote the screenplay for the film's sequel, also based on the continuation of the original novel, Gump and Co., published in 1995 by Winston Groom. Roth's script began with Gump sitting on a bench waiting for his son to return from school. However, after the terrorist attacks of September 11, Roth, Zemeckis and Hanks decided that the story was no longer relevant. Despite this, in March 2007 it was even said that the producers of Paramount took another look at it. to that script.
On the front page of Gump and Co., Forrest Gump tells readers to "never let anyone make a movie of your life, good or bad, it doesn't matter." In the first chapter of this novel we already see that the real life events surrounding the film have been incorporated into its plot and that Forrest has been the center of attention worldwide as a result of the film's release. In the second novel, Gump meets Tom Hanks and towards the end of the book it tells of the premiere of Zemeckis's film, Gump's visit to the television show Late Show with David Letterman and his attendance at the Oscar awards ceremony.
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