Forrest Gump (1994). Courtesy Paramount Pictures.
Forrest Gump fits surprisingly well into army training. He listens carefully, does what he is told and puts his weapon back together at a speed that impresses his superiors. The joke depends on a specific ability. Forrest can follow an instruction without getting distracted by all the other things the men around him might be thinking about.
Speaking to Francine Stock at BAFTA in 2013, Hanks recalled an earlier version of the army scenes that made Forrest and Bubba a clumsy comic pair, wrecking jeeps and getting into trouble. He could not see how they would remain in the army, or how that comedy would work in Vietnam.
Hanks suggested that Forrest should be good at following instructions. He recalled Robert Zemeckis responding with the weapon-assembly idea. The humour now came from something he could do well. It also left room for the film to take him seriously when the circumstances became dangerous.
Hanks said the cast and screenwriter Eric Roth spent two weeks discussing the script together. The army scenes show what that conversation could change: whether we watch Forrest fail at a job, or watch him handle a job in a way the others do not expect.
The friendship with Bubba gives the army sequence its emotional weight. Bubba talks about shrimp, home and the business he wants to build. Forrest listens. When the fighting begins, the person attached to those plans matters more to him than the scale of the war. His repeated attempts to find and carry men to safety turn that attention into something physical and exhausting.
Zemeckis's 1994 film keeps placing Forrest beside enormous public events, then letting a personal connection command his attention. At the Washington rally, the crowd and the monument fill the frame, but Jenny's arrival changes what the moment means to him. The bus-stop storyteller can describe presidents, battles and fame. What he returns to is who was there with him, what they needed, and whether he could get back to them.
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