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Hanks is a kid again in director Robert Zemeckis' Forrest Gump. Slow-witted and likable, Forrest races through the rubble of the '50s, '60s and '70s. Thanks to novelist Winston Groom's cunning plot (Eric Roth wrote the script) and some nifty visual effects, Forrest pops up in many a historic venue: with George Wallace at the schoolhouse door, in the seared rice fields of Vietnam, along the Great Wall of China, at the Watergate Hotel during a third-rate burglary. As his mother and his pals die around him, he pursues his life's love; the movie might be called Four Funerals and a Wedding.
Like the new Wyatt Earp, this episodic ersatz epic feels more like a mini- series than a movie. It's a long drink of water at the fountain of pop- social memory. It wants to find an optimism in survival: if we somehow got through the past 35 years, we must be O.K. So Forrest comes across as a sweeter Zelig, a candied Candide, as the film strains to find America's inner child. But Hanks holds it together because he is working to discover Forrest's inner adult -- the mature man under his infantile guilelessness. This effort pays off magnificently in Forrest's climactic declaration of love. Hanks' tone is both operatic and judicious; he makes passionate sentiment seem the highest form of common sense.
Other stars attract audiences by saving the world or stopping a runaway bus. A Hanks movie deals with more mundane imperatives: doing your job, staying alive, getting the girl. Simple things seem unattainable; when attained, they feel sublime.
In Splash, Hanks sits at a bar and pours out his lace-valentine heart: "I wanna meet a woman and I wanna fall in love and I wanna get married and I wanna have a kid and I wanna go see him play a tooth in the school play. It's not much." But to ordinary, unique people -- the folks Hanks appeals to, and the folks he so smartly plays -- it's everything.