_Forrest Gump_ reviewed by Cynthia Fuchs Ping pong. _Forrest Gump_ is about what might be called the "ping pong effect." When Forrest, a superstar player, goes to China (indicated by red walls and crowds of thousands), he looks like he whips that little ball good. But he doesn't. Tom Hanks hits air. The ball is digitized later. You see it but you don't. According to the ad campaign, "The world will never be the same once you've seen it through the eyes of Forrest Gump." This self-important claim means more than you might think. On the surface, it suggests that Forrest, whose low-IQ and emotional vitality grants him an unusual generosity, will move "you": he's just so dear. At another level, "you" can watch the unfolding of recent U.S. history; born in Alabama in the mid-forties, the wondrously innocent Forrest leads "you'' through a shorthand version of the next three decades (he meets Elvis, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Dick Cavett, John Lennon, maybe even Mao). At still another, more profound, level, _Forrest Gump_ -- directed by FX-wiz Robert Zemeckis (_Who Framed Roger Rabbit?_, _Back to the Future_, _Death Becomes Her_) -- may shift the way you think about the movies. For it *is* the future. Like _T2_, _Jurassic Park_, AT&T's "You will" ads, and Paula Abdul's Diet Coke commercials, this flick uses high- tech digitizing to mess with old-fashioned images of people or events who were in front of someone's camera at some point in time. In the future which is now, these "actual" pictures are only a point of departure: the real business of making movies has to do with refinements and alterations. You want to see Sam Neill cowering from a T-Rex? No problem. Robert Patrick passing through steel bars? Cool. Or Robin Williams flying without strings? Just get a lot of smart, data-savvy people to write programs that transform what looks like solid matter into pixels which are then almost infinitely manipulable. Actors schmactors. Get LBJ himself: he'll fly without strings if you want him to. All this is the fun part of _Forrest Gump_: even if some of ILM technology remains a little clumsy (JFK's mouth doesn't quite fit what comes out of it when he meets our hero), much of it is grand and more or less convincing. The story it tells is somewhat less thrilling; in fact, it's pretty antiquated. Based on Winston Groom's novel and written by Eric Roth, the movie is heavily invested in simplification. While of it is quite funny (a young and awkward Forrest inspires Elvis to thrust his pelvis), by the end it's gotten rather tedious. State-of-the-art technique meets revisionary nostalgia. Again. The film opens with a computer-generated feather wafting through blue sky and leafy trees to land at Forrest's feet. He's sitting at a bus stop and proceeds to tell anyone who happens by about his remarkable life, translated by this flashback structure into a string of episodes. While Forrest says (that his mama says) that "life is like a box a chock-lits; you never know what you're gonna get," here life is more like a series of digitally composed events, drawn from history and movies. It's not so hard to guess what you're going to get. Forrest's recollections are focused through women, his mother (Sally Field) and his one true love, Jenny (Robin Wright). Mama is sort of a cross between Jessica Tandy and, well, Sally Field in something like _Steel Magnolias_, a proud Southern gentlewoman whose fierce devotion to her son gives him indefatiguable hope and trust. A sweet if slightly diffident child, young Forrest (an appealing Michael Humphreys) is introduced as a smalltown doctor tries to correct his curved spine with big old leg braces. Once he loses these braces (miraculously), Forrest is incredibly fast: with the help of slow motion and nifty editing, he can outrun boy-tormenters on bicycles and, later, when he turns into Hanks, teen-tormenters in pick-up trucks. Next episode: Forrest becomes a star running back football who gets a university scholarship. And next: When he enlists in the military, Forrest is deemed a "genius" by his drill sergeant because he never even thinks to resist an order. When he goes to Vietnam, he befriends an amiable black recruit named Bubba (Mykelti Williamson) whose dream is to own a shrimping boat, and the driven Lt. Dan (Gary Sinise), whose dream is to die with honor like every other heroic white man in his family. (He ends up as a digitized double amputee, one of the film's more striking effects.) Forrest's relationships with these characters ground the lengthy Vietnam sequence (supervised by veteran "Vietnam advisor" Dale Dyeand shot in Greenbow, Alabama, just down the way from the site used for Mama Gump's boarding house). It's a combination of nightmarish battle scenes, mud, torrential rains, and marine-bonding rituals. In other words, it's about all those well-worn conventions that make up Vietnam war movies, not the war. Ping pong. Events after the war start to pile up a little faster. When Forrest goes home and wins a Congressional Medal of Honor for saving at least some of his platoon, he's accidentally enlisted by anti-war protestors for a demonstration at the Reflecting Pool (where we see someone resembling Abbie Hoffman: he says "fuck'' a lot). The Black Panthers and SDS start proselytizing. After he wins at ping pong in China, Forrest becomes a spokesperson for paddles. He becomes a millionaire and a long distance runner. Etcetera. By now you surely see the point: because he's so disingenuous, so trusting and lovely, Forrest can be used by anyone for any purpose, not unlike the images used by the filmmakers. It's an interesting problem that the film introduces, this disconnection of so-called reality from its so-called representation. If there's anything that recent controversies over media images have demonstrated, it's that faith in the visual is highly overrated. What you see is not necessarily what is. "Because Forrest Gump is a pure and simple individual without any opinions or politics," says Zemeckis, "he can travel through a tapestry of American images spanning three decades, reflecting back the mayhem and the madness that's going on around him.'' A tapestry. Right. Let's scratch this surface a little. Amid this celebration of individual candor and naivete, amid this outpouring of universal homilies and worship of Forrest's preternatural resilience (which is parodied when he becomes an enigmatic guru-runner whose devotees have not a clue why he's running), the parallel track of a less idealized history is embodied by Jenny. She absorbs all the social and political abuses that Forrest "reflects." (On top of which, she wears all the horrific faddish fashions, from hippie-blouses to disco- silver-lame to tacky waitress uniforms; all the emblems of historical "progression" that Forrest, apparently born in a plaid shirt and khakis, can blithely ignore.) As childhood friends Jenny and Forrest climb trees, as adults who re-meet intermittently, they share a deep and complicated friendship. He, being so delightfully simple, can't grasp the pain she feels (she's abused by her father and boyfriends) or the political commitments she makes. And it's her story that the film can't quite get at, the one with unhappy circumstances, the one that's impure and not simple. It's the same old story: she remains a cypher. Cynthia Fuchs teachs film and media studies at George Mason University. Copyright 1994 by Cynthia Fuchs. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author. This review originally appeared in the Philadelphia _City Paper_.