13.04.1995

Gump award hype

John Bayliss reviews 'Forrest Gump'

THE FILM Forrest Gump won a large number of Oscars at the recent Academy Awards, to the disgust of an even larger number of left and right bourgeois critics, particularly those in Britain. Their argument amounted to the complaint that it portrayed a simplistic triumph of good over evil, and that Four Weddings and a Funeral was a better film anyway.

Now I expect neither Hollywood nor the British film industry to produce revolutionary art, and like many other people I go to the flicks for an evening’s entertainment. But I found that both films had some content of intellectual worth. However, Four Weddings and a Funeral attempted to gloss over the disgusting nature of upper class life while avoiding any criticism whatsoever of these moral and intellectual bankrupts.

Forrest Gump, in contrast, had a Candide quality about it, pointing out that success or failure in capitalist America was subject to the possession of finance and good fortune rather than virtue.

If Gump had a semi-happy outcome to his life, it was at the expense of a disaster for the majority of his friends and relations, the prostitution of his mother, the oppression of blacks, the destruction of a whole industry, and a war shown as brutal and useless. All this against a background of political corruption that was very wittily portrayed.

Most of the British complaints amounted to chauvinistic sour grapes. Neither film is a masterpiece, but what do you expect from capitalist film makers?

John Bayliss