Forrest Gump Film Analysis

Forrest Gump is a film that defies the conventions of filmmaking, and in that sense it is difficult to do a typical analysis of the film. It’s not so much that the film is overly complicated or that reality is always in question or any art house tricks of that kind; it’s just that Gump doesn’t really follow any rules.
We begin with the most obvious: the plot. This is a film that should have redefined the biopic. It is completely about the life and times of Forrest, the protagonist, in fact through it all that’s the only thing it’s consistently about. Other films that tell the story of a person’s life are usually focused on one section of a person’s life, even cradle-to-grave biopics usually hinge on some narrative fulcrum. This film, however, makes no pretensions of having a conventional plot, and in this regard it surpasses even Citizen Kane in the biopic subgenre. Whereas in Kane there is a pretense to find out about Charles Foster Kane, and the search for the meaning of Rosebud, in Gump all we get is Forrest telling us his life story. Story for story’s sake, it’s a beautiful thing. In this sense we also get filmmakers playing with time in an interesting way. For the first two hours of the film we are told what has happened in Forrest’s life up until this point. …show more content…
The first great line to come out of the movie is one that’s simple and really demonstrates what Forrest’s mother is all about “If God had intended us all to be the same, we’d all have braces on our legs.” Many of the great lines became great due to the editing of sound and film alike. An example of good film editing is when Forrest’s mother tells him that “You’re not different.” Then it cuts to the principal saying “The boy’s different, Mrs. Gump.” We get a lot of comedy out of Hanks’ voice-overs in which he often says something and then we see it happen in the scene. The best example came in Vietnam. It goes like