When I was living in the Twin Cities area, a woman wrote in to the St. Paul Pioneer Press to roast the critics whose breathless praise for Pulp Fiction had compelled her to see it, much to her disgust; all those bad words, and the violence, and the drugs!
Welcome to the 1995 Best Picture race, as clear a picture of Oscar rewarding Oscarness as you'll find. In any other year, nominees like Quiz Show and even The Shawshank Redemption would be serious competition, and Four Weddings and a Funeral had more going for it than many dark horses in its position. In '95, however, they weren't even in the running, and everyone knew it.
Forrest Gump eased into theaters in the summer of 1994, the first movie from director Robert Zemeckis since Death Becomes Her, which itself followed the last Back to the Future film. Like his previous films, it was a marvel of techno-gimcrackery, but unlike them, it was marked not by his subversive humor but by a single-minded solemnity that would go on to inform Zemeckis' Contact and Cast Away.
The three movies share a lot, most notably a decidedly spiritual bent. The awkward manifestation of this is that all three are full of Gumpisms — even and especially Cast Away, Zemeckis' most mature and coherent statement, suffers from this; its shot at sublimity (which survives even whale songs, mind you) is scotched by Tom Hanks waxing about sunrises.
It's not the witless witticisms that sink Gump, however; the movie's problems are far deeper. Gump plays like a Mad Magazine version of U.S. history, but instead of Alfred E. Neuman threading "What, Me Worry?" jibes through history's greatest hits, it's dim-bulb sage Forrest Gump (Hanks), who's barely given the presence of mind to worry.
The dynamic character in the story is not Forrest but Jenny (Robin Wright), whose life is presented as an analog to Forrest's. Jenny essentially makes all the wrong decisions, shuttling like an air hockey puck down a Plinko board of domestic abuse, drug addiction, unbridled promiscuity — and she's only perfunctorily kind to Forrest, which curiously culminates in her having him impregnate her, after which she, in short order, gives birth, contracts HIV and dies of AIDS. It couldn't be more contrived, but of course it's perfect for the martyr metaphor that the warm-fuzzy payoff requires. There's nothing an audience likes better than not being held accountable for any shortcomings it may have, and Gump delivers that in spades: Jenny may die for our sins, but she lives her life on her own terms (yay!) and after her death, her kid — the only thing resemblining responsibility to which she is ever attached — gets to be raised by, well, a saint, or at least a holy fool. Consider it from the perspective of the boomers who lived through the times Gump details: Not only does are any past mistakes A-OK, but your kids are well-looked-after as well!
But Gump — like Contact and Cast Away — are tremendous entertainments; it's only in the aftermath that they have trouble holding together if you think too hard about them. But not thinking about them — which has long been a favorite Academy pastime — makes them masterpieces, and wise, and important.
And then there's Pulp Fiction. Hopefully we're now far enough out from the last aftershock of anti-Tarantino backlash to freely remember just how closely we the audience, upon receiving the film, resembled Uma Thurman's character upon receiving the adrenaline injection. Few arguments can be mounted to dispute how significant the film was in the history of independent film, in encouraging American acceptance of nonlinear narrative, in establishing a genre that's still kicking about (OK, so not all its after effects were good). The point that often gets missed, however, is what a moral film it is. People do bad things — kill, cheat, steal, rape — and bad things happen to them — they're killed, or cheated, or robbed, or raped. Make what bones you will with the fine points of that moral code; it at least establishes a causal connection between actions and consequences missing from Gump. It's not a great or groundbreaking or monumental film because of that; it's all those things in addition to it. Pulp Fiction had it all — including, yes, the bad words, and the violence, and the drugs! — and it's only strengthened by further inspection. It's anything but a feather, downy white and unmottled, to be carried away on the next breeze.
— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)
