In Forrest Gump, the title character - a guileless, slow-thinking Alabamian played by Tom Hanks - sits on a sidewalk bench, his sneakers muddy, his sport shirt buttoned to the neck, dork-style, and recounts a remarkable history. His autobiography, shared with a succession of folks waiting for their buses, strangely dovetails with key moments in modern American politics and pop culture: From the Watergate break-in to Elvis' pelvis-shaking debut on Ed Sullivan, Forrest Gump was there.
As such, this clever film with its none-too-clever protagonist becomes a boomer scrapbook, a time-trip through recent decades with the slow-talking ''village idiot'' as our tour guide. Adapted from a 1985 comic novel by Winston Groom, it's a naif's chronicle of America, as this Gump guy, with his shoofly cadences and whopper-size yarns, pushes our memory buttons, calling up iconic images of assassination attempts, Vietnam napalm attacks, protest marches and hippie sojourns in VW vans.
Forrest Gump has a little bit of Being There about it (the tale of a simpleton's ascension) and a little bit of Zelig (an Everyman inserts himself in momentous events), and a little too much slickness for its own good. Although this is an enjoyable and, at times, emotionally charged picture with wonderfully funny episodes, there's a hollowness there, too.
Like the blank-faced Gump, who blunders headlong through life, the film is oddly shallow - even as it showers Big Metaphors down around us. (When, in the opening credits, the camera tracks a feather floating from the sky, accompanied by Alan Silvestri's syrupy score, you can be sure that feather will return for a tidy sense of closure at film's end.)
Hanks, who won an Academy Award this year for his fine work in Philadelphia, is likely to be nominated again next winter. For one thing, Forrest Gump is the latest in a long line of intellectually stunted movie heroes: From Marty to Of Mice and Men to Rain Man, Oscar loves the mentally impaired. More significant, Hank delivers an affecting performance. Wearing a severe flattop and a sweetly vacant expression, the actor gives his character a high-class, humorous dignity. Michael Humphreys, who stars as young Forrest in the picture's early sequences, deserves credit, too: It's a quirky, complicated role for a child, and he plays it exceedingly well.
Sally Field offers a Sally Fieldian performance as Forrest's homily spewing mother, a boarding-house proprietress whose itinerant clientele foreshadows her son's own wandering ways. Gary Sinise, the actor-director responsible for the 1992 remake of Of Mice and Men, is especially strong as an Army lieutenant who sees death as his destiny in the jungles of 'Nam. And Mykelti Williamson portrays a rural Southerner with an encyclopedic knowledge of shrimp and not much else. In the brains department, Williamson's Bubba is Forrest Gump's match.
Robin Wright, who plays Forrest's lifelong sweetheart, Jenny (just to hear the way Hanks says her name - ''JENN-ee'' - is to know he loves her), has a more problematic part. A woman who encounters abuse at every turn, Jenny is Forrest's polar opposite. Where he skirts calamities, she gets tangled up in them. In the 1960s, as a Joan Baez wannabe, Jenny ends up singing beatnik ballads - in a strip club. (Nude and holding a guitar, she's introduced to a room of leering, libidinous men as ''Bobbi Dylan.'') In the '70s, she snorts cocaine and climbs atop a highrise balcony, thinking she can fly. But though we understand the source of her angst, we don't get enough time with her - she's just another person whose fate intersects with Forrest's.
It is the sequences in which Hanks' hero hobnobs with JFK and LBJ that already have people talking. Using the type of computer-generated visual effects that positioned live actors opposite animated 'toons in his Who Framed Roger Rabbit, director Robert Zemeckis playfully puts Forrest in the Oval Office by seamlessly inserting his star in archival footage.
Zemeckis and his effects team also conjure up a harrowing Southeast Asian war zone, and give actor Sinise a double leg amputation so realistic it becomes a point of distraction. Instead of following the struggles of Sinise's Lt. Dan, you sit there wondering, ''How'd they do that?''
Zemeckis is an accomplished, technically skilled filmmaker, and in addition to flashing back on recent decades of American history, he flashes back on decades of cinema history as well: There are quotations here from Birth of a Nation, Midnight Cowboy and Apocalypse Now, to name a few.
Despite its visual richness, and despite its canny conflation of historic icons and events, this isn't the meaningful movie it pretends to be. But as a goofy entertainment that speeds through the latter half of the 20th century, stopping here and there to snap a photo or two, Forrest Gump does just fine.