Leave Forrest Gump alone – Tom Hanks’s Oscar-winning charmer doesn’t deserve the stigma

Sex. Psychedelia. Political assassination. Race riots. The Vietnam war. High-speed table tennis. Seafood commerce. Forrest Gump had anything and everything. The 1994 film was one of the most unlikely blockbusters of its era, a decades-spanning epic that combines portentousness with extreme whimsy. Its charmed, cartoonishly benevolent protagonist became Tom Hanks’s signature role. Lines from the screenplay (“Run, Forrest, run!” and “Life is like a box of chocolates”) passed into common usage. And yet, despite being a smash hit at the box office and winning six Oscars (including Best Director, Best Actor and Best Picture), Forrest Gump continues to polarise opinion.

Even during its original release, certain critics couldn’t resist lobbing stones at it with the same brutal glee as the Alabama schoolkids who treat young Forrest so abominably early on in the film. “Bleak yet saccharine”, “reactionary”, and “infantile stupidity alchemised into feel-good dopiness” were just some of the more caustic remarks made against the film.

Its screenwriter Eric Roth and director Robert Zemeckis were excoriated for taking all the satirical bite out of the Winston Groom novel upon which it was based. Detractors were appalled that what seemed to them such bland and ersatz fare was stealing Quentin Tarantino’s thunder at the 1995 Academy Awards, having steamrollered over Pulp Fiction in multiple major categories.

But three decades on, Gump (soon to be re-released in cinemas to mark its 30th anniversary) remains as vivacious and daring as ever. Its story – which follows a man who survives a lifetime of trauma to become an all-American success story, inserting himself into the history books at every juncture – is unlike any other. It gradually wears away residual cynicism, as though you are one of those suspicious onlookers eventually won over by Forrest’s maunderings.

Gump begins, famously, with a moment of bravura filmmaking. A feather floats across the streets of Savannah, Georgia, eventually landing at the feet of a man in a white suit and scuffed sneakers who is sitting on a bench beside a bus stop. This is Forrest Gump. He opens his tidily packed suitcase, takes out his copy of the children’s book Curious George, and places the feather between its pages. Then he starts talking to a stranger and offers her a chocolate.

Oscar-nominated cinematographer Don Burgess tells me that he used “a crane on top of a crane” to film the feather as it floats downward past the trees and houses. He remembers first reading the script and “loving the whimsical quality of it” but also realising that it would be an “overwhelming challenge to pull off”. Gump is full of moments like this opening sequence: arresting and poetic – but hard to comprehend.

The storytelling isn’t quite as original as some fans might suspect. Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983) also featured a chameleon-like character who kept turning up at pivotal moments in history. The film similarly drew on Hal Ashby’s Being There (1979), which starred Peter Sellers as a simple gardener who turns into a political guru.

Even so, the studios were initially baffled that anyone would even want to make such an offbeat film. As the producer Wendy Finerman (who spent almost a decade trying to pull the finance together) told The New York Times in a 1994 interview: “Actors, directors, agents, studio people were just not interested in the project.” They all felt that audiences who had already seen Rain Man (1988), starring Dustin Hoffman as an “autistic savant”, certainly wouldn’t want to watch another film with what we would now call a neurodivergent protagonist.

Their misgivings were partly shared by the cast and crew. “Is anybody going to care about this movie? This guy sitting on a bench, in these goofy shoes, in this cuckoo suit, with a suitcase full of Curious George books? Are we doing anything here that is going to make any sense to anybody?” Hanks said to The New Yorker, recalling his feelings at the time of the shoot.

Given its scope, the film was made on a relatively modest budget – a reported $50m. “We were, a lot of the time, working six-day weeks already on the movie. Sundays became the ‘Let’s go shoot some running’ day,” the cinematographer says, recalling the breakneck schedule and all the weekend overtime.

Gump runs from east to west coast and through plenty of places in between. The filmmakers didn’t fake those scenes. They went with him everywhere, from the Santa Monica pier to the lighthouse in Maine, from Montana to Wyoming. “It was a logistical nightmare in figuring it all out,” Burgess remembers.

When it finally appeared, Forrest Gump may have divided opinion, but everybody went to see it. The film achieved astonishing global box office returns of close to $700m, outperforming The Avengers, Jurassic World and Black Panther in its lifetime-adjusted grosses.

“My mom always said life was like a box of chocolates... you never know what you’re gonna get,” Gump tells the stranger at the start of the film, who is doing her very best to ignore him. Screenwriter Roth was inspired to write the maudlin line by the opening sentence in Groom’s novel: “Let me say this: bein’ an idiot is no box of chocolates.”

The novel’s Gump is very different from the one that emerges on screen. In the book, he is a self-aware figure who places himself in a long tradition of the idiot savant (stretching from Shakespeare’s Fool in King Lear to Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird). He is a big, bawdy man who swears constantly and has lots of sex.

In the film, the irony and artifice are largely stripped away. As played by Hanks, Forrest is a holy innocent with a naiveté that rekindles memories of silent-era movie comedians like Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton. Certain sequences could have come straight from one of their movies, such as his moment of glory in a college American football match when he races through to score a touchdown but then keeps on going, speeding out of the stadium.

The filmmaker had somehow transformed a satirical novel, full of sex and politics, into a mainstream family crowd-pleaser. Crucial to the process was the love story at the story’s core. The moment little Jenny offers him a seat on the school bus, Forrest is instantly smitten. They go together as well as “peas and carrots”. She becomes his lifetime obsession.

Robin Wright, who played Jenny as an adult, recently told chat show host Jimmy Fallon that Forrest Gump was the one time in her career when she knew she had “nailed” an audition. She was pregnant at the time, felt very “grounded”, and had a “great connection” with Hanks from the start. Their romance provided a film that might otherwise have seemed very randomly structured with a narrative through line.

But there’s always been a darkness to Gump that belies its sickly sweet reputation. The film is full of death, bereavement and extreme loneliness. Jenny is also caught up in the upheaval of the times. While Forrest is dodging the gunfire and rescuing wounded GIs from the battlefield in Vietnam, she is immersed in the civil rights movement and at the centre of the counterculture. She takes drugs and is pushed to the brink of suicide. Her experiences provide a twisted reflection of what Forrest endures. Abused by her sharecropper father as a kid, beaten up by her boyfriend, she represents the underside of the American dream.

Forrest Gump is also an old-fashioned buddy movie – another reason so many people warmed to it. The relationship between Gump and Lt 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, neurodivergent Lennie in John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men. (Sinise had in fact directed and starred in a movie adaptation of the book a year before.)

Cinematographer Burgess remembers that the crew “fell in love with Forrest Gump when we were making the movie, but you never have any idea if the audience is going to do the same thing”.

Three decades on, it’s not too hard to work out what gives the film its strange potency. The magic lies in the sure-footed way the filmmakers conjured an upbeat folk tale from material that is so bleak.

The public’s enduring affection for Gump may be rekindled with the release of the new film Here later this year, which reunites director Zemeckis, stars Hanks and Wright, and screenwriter Roth. The new film is a family drama based on Richard McGuire’s graphic novel, with Hanks and Wright playing a couple who marry and raise children. Burgess was again the cinematographer, but he warns audiences not to expect a second Gump. “The creative team [behind Forrest Gump] is back together, but it has its own story,” he says.

As for Gump himself, there are still plenty of people who can’t stomach him – while others still regard him as one of the greatest movie heroes of the 1990s. He may not be a smart man, but he knows what love is. You’d have to be quite a curmudgeon to reject him altogether.

‘Forrest Gump’ is re-released on 19 July