While many “Forrest Gump” fans took Taylor Sheridan to task for his comments, the movie has always had its share of disparagers. This is in part due to it winning the Academy Award for best picture over “The Shawshank Redemption” and “Pulp Fiction.” It’s one of those movies everyone either loves or hates, but it’s worth analyzing whether Sheridan’s opinion is a bit too myopic for what the film is. Sheridan elaborated, “[Forrest is] just gonna go on a f***ing run across America, and everyone’s gonna follow him, and that’s gonna heal the country? … What is this s***?”
While “Forrest Gump” has earned a reputation for being too feel-good, there’s more there than many people give it credit for. It’s worth reading Dave Kehr’s 1994 review of “Forrest Gump” for the New York Daily News. He wrote, “What looks at first like a bright, bouncy and sentimental trip through the baby-boom era (the film moves from 1943 to 1983) turns out, on closer inspection, to be a dark and driven work, haunted by violence, cruelty and a sense of the tragically absurd.” Sheridan points toward the Forrest running sequence as evidence of its excessive sentimentality while ignoring the film’s portrayal of the Vietnam War and other aspects that delve into a darker side of the American experience.
Movies are inherently subjective. People can watch the same thing and come away with entirely different opinions; that’s part of the beauty of film. Sheridan can like what he likes, but if he truly thinks “Forrest Gump” is too simplistic, perhaps he should consider these words from X user @1021129O: “Sometimes life is very simple if you want it to be.”
