Forrest Gump came out in 1994, thirty-two years ago this year. More than 2.3 million people have rated it on Douban, giving it a 9.5; on IMDb it holds an 8.8. Most people’s memory of the film stops at two things: the line “Life was like a box of chocolates,” and the silhouette of a man running across America. Before writing this piece, I went through its box office, its awards history, the original novel, and a few of the famous critical readings, one by one. Underneath the chicken soup there is another layer, and it is more interesting than the soup.
Start with the name. Early in the film, Forrest sits on a bus-stop bench explaining to strangers where his name comes from: Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general in the Civil War and the earliest leader of the Ku Klux Klan. His mother gave him that name, in her own words, to remind the family that sometimes we all do things that just don’t make no sense. The heaviest stretch of the American South’s history sits inside this character’s name, and he walks into the story as a boy with an IQ of 75 and braces on his legs.
Everything the boy goes on to do runs the other way from that name. On his first school bus, nobody would let him sit down; only Jenny moved over. The day he arrived at college, he stumbled on the governor standing in the doorway blocking Black students, and when a Black girl’s books fell in the crowd, he picked them up and walked in with her. On the army bus to Vietnam, once again no one wanted the seat next to him; Bubba, who talked about nothing but shrimping, sat down and never stopped talking. Bubba died in Vietnam. Forrest came home, took his medal, and carried on the shrimping business for him.
What many people don’t know is that the original behind this film, which carries warmth to its limit, is a completely different animal. Winston Groom’s novel came out in 1986 and sold only forty thousand copies in its first years. The book’s Forrest is cynical and sharp-tongued, an idiot savant of a man. His adventures are more outlandish than the film’s: he goes into space, with an ape along for the ride, and when he gets back to the ground he becomes a professional wrestler. His father’s death is more absurd still: working on the docks, he is crushed by a falling crate of bananas. Jenny doesn’t die in the book either; in the end she marries a man named Donald. Most important of all, there is no cross-country run in the novel. Forrest’s most famous act was invented out of whole cloth for the film. After the movie came out, the novel sold 1.7 million copies.
The people adapting it knew exactly what they were doing. In July 1994 the film opened on a $55 million budget and ended up taking $677 million worldwide, $329 million in North America alone. At the Oscars the following March, it won six awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. The nominees sitting across from it were The Shawshank Redemption and Pulp Fiction.
Critics have never been willing to let it alone. The best-known reading comes from film scholar Dai Jinhua, who calls Forrest a “cultural mediator” and says he carries the mythic function of healing the rifts of race, culture, and value. A little more than two years earlier, in April 1992, several white officers who beat a Black teenager had been acquitted, and Los Angeles burned; when the film opened, those wounds were still open. Dai says the film offered a fractured society a kind of imaginary redemption. She also names the price: the film uses a simpleton’s monologue to produce a “lie effect,” erasing the civil rights movement and women’s liberation into “structural blanks,” rewriting real struggles into one man’s success.
At first I thought this was too harsh. Then I watched the film again and found that Forrest says it himself. On the day he decides to stop running, he tells the crowd that has followed him for years: “My mama always said you got to put the past behind you before you can move on.” Put the past behind you. The rewriting Dai Jinhua criticizes is one the film confesses to in its own dialogue. Forrest’s face is blank as he says it. Perfectly clean.
The performance is close to beyond dispute. Tom Hanks had won Best Actor the previous year for Philadelphia; this was his second, making him only the second actor in Oscar history after Spencer Tracy to win Best Actor twice in a row. Plenty of articles online call him “the only back-to-back winner,” and that sentence stopped being true in March 2025, when Adrien Brody won his second for The Brutalist and became the third. Hanks plays the part with restraint, the Southern accent slowed down, the eyes clean throughout. A good share of Forrest’s cross-country running shots were actually run by his real-life brother Jim Hanks, doubling for him. The technology was startling for its time too: the crew used digital compositing to insert Hanks into archival footage, shaking hands with Kennedy, sharing a stage with John Lennon; even Elvis’s signature hip swivel is staged as an imitation of the boy in leg braces at the Gump boarding house. The craft took the Oscar for Best Visual Effects.
The supporting character who hurts most is Lieutenant Dan. Gary Sinise plays a man whose ancestors died in every American war, who assumed he would die in Vietnam too, and was instead carried out by Forrest at the cost of his legs. He curses God, curses Forrest, and stands on the mast of the shrimp boat waiting for a storm to take him. When the storm passes, he jumps into the water and swims. Later, at Forrest’s wedding, he stands up on titanium prosthetic legs. His story feels more like ordinary people than Forrest’s does.
The film also pulled off something no other classic has managed: turning fiction into a real business. In 1996 the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company opened, its first restaurant in Monterey, California, with the 1994 film credited as its inspiration. Every table holds two small signs, “Run Forrest Run” and “Stop Forrest Stop,” and whichever one the customer flips up, the servers act accordingly. By 2008 there were 31 locations: 22 in the United States, 2 in Mexico, and the other 7 in East Asia. By the record, it was the first theme restaurant ever spun off from a movie. A line from the screen ending up as a signal for waiters to bring the food: only Forrest gets that kind of fate.
At the end of the film, little Forrest climbs onto the school bus, and the feather that drifted across the whole town in the opening scene, landing at his feet, slips out of the old book and floats back into the sky. Where it lands, the film doesn’t say. The crowd that ran behind him for hundreds of days is still waiting for an answer. He stops and says: “I’m pretty tired. I think I’ll go home now.”
Thirty-two years on, some people see inspiration in this film and some see a lie, and neither side has talked the other around. That is probably why it is still worth watching today. The box of chocolates isn’t finished yet.