And then. After all that. Just three years later. Only three! Your husband comes to you.
Again.
“Honey.”
“Yeah?”
“Honey.”
“…”
“I blew up the baby.”
RATING: 3/10 DVDs of The Fugitive.
Dude, You Gotta Stop Listening to Your Mom
We open with a feather, which is a metaphor. You see, because it’s white, like Tom Hanks, and you want it to stay away from you, like the Vietnam War. Also this feather shot JFK.
After falling off a disgusting bird somewhere, the feather floats over and lands on Tom Hanks’s foot. Tom Hanks plays Forrest Gump, our hero, currently waiting for the bus with childlike wonder and also bothering this elderly woman who is just trying to live. Gump picks up the feather (UGH, DON’T TOUCH IT) and presses it between the pages of Curious George, his favorite book. Congrats. Now your suitcase has bird mites.
“Hello!” Gump says to the lady. “My name’s Forrest. Forrest Gump. You want a chock-lit? I could eat about a million of these. My momma always said life is like a box of chock-lits. You never know what you’re gonna get.” I mean, you mostly know. They write it on the lid.
Then the lady tells Gump that her feet hurt and she JUST WANTS TO GO HOME, so, naturally, he launches into his entire life story.
Small Gump goes to the doctor with his mom (Sally Field, who apparently gave birth to him when she was ten) to get fitted with some leg braces because “his back’s as crooked as a politician.” Gump reminisces about his ancestral namesake, General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Fortunately, Gump, much like that filthy feather, is too pure to understand what racism is, so he thinks that the Klan was a sort of slumber party club where “they’d even put bedsheets on they horses and ride around.”
Now, I guess that little rhetorical loophole (which serves the twofold goals of emphasizing Gump’s naivete and keeping this feel-good movie max digestible) is better than just not addressing how fucking racist Alabama was in the 1950s, but I can’t help feeling like Gump was AGGRESSIVELY failed by the system. Like, he’s no brainiac, but he’s capable of understanding basic concepts! If he can follow the rules of Ping-Pong to the letter, he can grasp the idea that some white people think they’re better than Black people. Instead, apparently everyone just tapped out hard on Forrest’s education, like, “Oh, he’s a little slow. Let’s NEVER TELL HIM ANYTHING.”
Then, the worst character from Lost (FUCKING BERNARD) shows up (WILL YOU NEVER LEAVE ME BE, FELL GHOUL?) and tells Sally Field that if she wants Gump to go to his school, she’s going to have to build a giant SOS sign out of rocks…IN HIS PANTS.
Actually, the interaction goes like this:
Bernard: Is there a Mr. Gump, Mrs. Gump?
Sally Field: He’s on vacation.
Bernard: [SEXUAL GRUNTING THAT WILL HAUNT LINDY WEST TO THE GRAVE]
Later, Forrest is like, “Mom, what’s ‘vacation’ mean? Where Daddy went?” and Sally Field goes, “Vacation’s where you go somewhere and you don’t ever come back.”
Again. Um. Respectfully, maybe the issue here isn’t that Forrest is a bumbling simpleton, it’s that his mom keeps telling him that life is chocolate and vacation means that you never come back??? Maybe he’s just an average dude who’s spent his whole life being lied to by freaks about the definitions of basic words.
On the first day of school, Gump meets his school bus driver:
Gump: Mama said not to be taking rides from strangers.
Bus Driver: This is the bus to school.
Gump: I’m Forrest, Forrest Gump.
Bus Driver: I’m Dorothy Harris.
Gump: Well, now we ain’t strangers anymore. [gets on bus]
I think I see a couple of holes in your security system there, Mrs. Gump, but okeydokey.
Once aboard the school bus, Gump becomes acquainted with a great Southern tradition: white people being territorial about bus seats. “This seeeyit’s taayyykuuhn.” “Cayn’t sit heeeeyuuuhhhhh.” But like a bolt from the heavens, Jennay appears with a fateful scooch. She lets Forrest sit by her, and, kicking off their “adorable” decades-long abuse pattern of Jennay being a complete dickhead and Forrest accepting it because he feels like he has no other options, she immediately goes, “Are you stupid or something?”
“Mama says stupid is as stupid does.”
YO. GUMP. WHAT does that mean.
Dude, you gotta stop listening to your mom.
One day, some mean kids on bikes start throwing rocks at Gump because of his leg braces, so Jennay’s like, “Run, Forrest! Ruuuuuuunnn!!!” (The fact that this took off as a catchphrase means we should all be in prison.) Forrest runs so hard that his LEGS EXPLODE and his leg braces scatter all over the road, which I guess is supposed to be triumphant even though I’m pretty sure those things are expensive and it’s not like Mrs. Gump is flush with leg-brace cash (or, as she calls it, “green chocolate”).
“From that day on,” Gump says, “if I was going somewhere, I was running.”
Then miniature Forrest and Jennay shape-shift into Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, and then those same shithead kids come to throw rocks at Forrest again, only their bikes have shape-shifted into a truck!!! So Jennay’s like, “Run, Forrest, ruuuuuuuuuuun!” again, and I guess you’re supposed to be like “CLAP CLAP CLAP CLAP CLAP CLAP OH HO HO A PHRASE I HAVE HEARD BEFORE! DEE-LIGHTFUL!!!”
Forrest run-Forrest-runs right through a college football game and the football coaches are like, “Gwuuuuuhhhhhh!???!!?!?!” and they hire him to play football for their college even though he is clearly forty-five years old. There’s a brief Mr. Ernst cameo, Forrest invents desegregation, and then Forrest uses punching to save Jennay from intercourse. Gump: The College Years.
Jennay takes Forrest to her dorm room for sexual gratitude and is like, “I want to be famous. I want to be a singer like Joan Baez.” And Forrest is like, “Is Joan Baez a kind of chock-lit?” And then Jennay’s like, CHECK OUT THESE CANS, and Forrest loses consciousness due to the cans (and probably control of his bladder on Jennay’s bed if we’re being honest?).
Speaking of bladders, Forrest gets to meet JFK because he’s so good at football-running, and tells the president that he is full up with urine. “Sometime later,” Gump says, “for no particular reason, somebody shot that nice young president when he was riding in his car.”
HOW DID YOU GRADUATE FROM COLLEGE? Also, could somebody answer, like, ONE of Forrest’s questions? You’re a college.
Then Gump joins the army, but on the army bus, eh-vuh-rayyee see-yuhht’s tayyy-kuhhhn UH-GEEEEE-YIN!!!!! That’s when Gump meets Bubba. Literally the only thing Bubba does is list different shrimp preparations, which Forrest interprets as “best friendship.”
One day, in the army, someone throws a dirty magazine at Forrest and goes, “Hey, Gump! Get a load of the tits on her!”
Gump gets a load.
OH NO! IT’S JENNAY! THOSE ARE JENNAY’S TITS UPON WHICH GUMP IS GETTING A LOAD!!!
Clearly, Jennay needs Forrest’s help. He finds her doing naked Joan Baez at a strip club, which is not going over that well because the patrons came to get a load of the tits on her, not listen to mediocre folk covers. So Forrest punches everyone and Jennay is, again, a real dick about it. “You can’t keep doing this, Forrest. You can’t keep trying to rescue me all the time.”