MOVIE MUSIC UK

THROWBACK THIRTY

Original Review by Jonathan Broxton

Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.

It’s not a cool thing to admit any more, but at this point in my life I’ve stopped caring what people think about my taste, and I simply accept it for what it is. So here’s my statement: Forrest Gump is one of my favorite films of all time. I first saw it in the fall of 1994, when it came out in cinemas in England, and it affected me deeply right from that first viewing. Not only did I love the film for what it was, but the part of the story involving the relationship between Forrest and his Mama somehow became inextricably linked to the real life relationship I have with my own mother Christine, so it means a great deal to me on an intensely personal level. It’s one of the films I have seen the most in my lifetime; I know the screenplay beat-for-beat, and I never get tired of quoting many of its iconic lines. I still laugh in all the right places, and the ending always moves me to tears.

The film is a comedy-drama directed by Robert Zemeckis, written by Eric Roth from the 1986 novel by Winston Groom, and stars Tom Hanks in the title role, delivering a career-defining performance and bringing an unparalleled level of authenticity and depth to what could have been, in other hands, a buffoonish character. The story is narrated by Forrest himself as he sits on a bench at a bus stop, recounting his incredible life to a series of strangers, and appears to be blissfully unaware of how he unwittingly became involved in and influenced numerous historical events in 20th century United States.

Forrest Gump is a kind-hearted and simple-minded man; born with a low IQ and needing to wear leg braces as a child, Forrest grows up in Greenbow, Alabama, where his loving mother (Sally Field) instills in him a sense of confidence and determination. Despite his challenges, Forrest’s life takes an extraordinary turn when he discovers he can run incredibly fast, which earns him a football scholarship to the University of Alabama. After college, Forrest enlists in the U.S. Army and serves in the Vietnam War, where he meets lifelong friends Bubba Blue (Mykelti Williamson) and Lieutenant Dan Taylor (Gary Sinise); Forrest saves many of his comrades during an ambush, earning the Medal of Honor. Post-war, he becomes a ping-pong champion, and later starts a successful shrimp fishing business with Lieutenant Dan, who left Vietnam confined to a wheelchair. Throughout the film, Forrest also demonstrates a deep love for his childhood friend Jenny Curran (Robin Wright); despite their different lives, their paths cross multiple times, and Forrest’s unwavering affection for Jenny never fades.

I found Forrest Gump to be an extraordinary film that effortlessly weaves together a rich tapestry of storytelling, emotion, and cinematic excellence. The writing is especially exceptional, seamlessly blending humor, drama, and historical context, offering both a big-picture snapshot of several decades of American history, while also maintaining a deeply personal and intimate narrative that touches on a variety of unexpectedly dark issues ranging from child abuse and drug abuse to racism, the horrors of war, depression, and death. The dialogue is sharp, witty, and often profoundly moving, and the relationship between Forrest and Jenny is particularly touching in how it juxtaposes Jenny’s tumultuous life in the counterculture movement of the 1960s and 1970s against Forrest’s naïvety.

Technically, Forrest Gump is a groundbreaking masterpiece, especially in the way Zemeckis made innovative but subtle use of early CGI to insert Forrest into historical footage of famous people – often with hilarious results – while also convincingly showing Lieutenant Dan’s transformation from capable military leader to bitter, shell-shocked amputee. It won six Oscars at the 1994 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Visual Effects, and was nominated for seven others.

The final part of the puzzle which makes Forrest Gump a masterpiece is its music. First of all, it has one of the greatest needle drop soundtracks of all time, a love letter to all the greatest American rock and pop music of the era. The choices encompass everyone from Elvis Presley and Joan Baez to Aretha Franklin, The Beach Boys, Jefferson Airplane, Fleetwood Mac, and many more. So many scenes are enhanced enormously by the songs in the moment: Forrest arriving in Vietnam to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son,” Jenny almost committing suicide to “Free Bird” by Lynyrd Skynyrd, Forrest running across America accompanied by “Running on Empty” by Jackson Browne and “Against the Wind” by Bob Seger, Forrest and Jenny emotionally parting in DC to the strains of “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season)” by The Byrds… the list goes on and on.

And then there is the original score by Alan Silvestri, which to this day remains my favorite of every score he has written, and which earned him his first and, to date, only Best Score Oscar nomination. Forrest Gump marked the seventh collaboration between Silvestri and director Robert Zemeckis, after Romancing the Stone, three Back to the Future films, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and Death Becomes Her, but whereas those scores tended to be either high on action and energy, or a specific pastiche style, Forrest Gump is all about emotion. I have read several negative responses to this score in recent years, with some commentators criticizing it for being overly-sentimental, cloying, overly-manipulative, and various other pejoratives, but I have never seen it like that. To me, Silvestri’s score is the musical representation of how Forrest sees the world: through simple, direct emotions, with no misdirection, no cynicism, no malice. Whether he is feeling love for Jenny or his Mama, feeling the exhilaration of running, or feeling sadness at the loss of a friend, Silvestri’s music speaks directly to how Forrest is feeling in any given moment in a straightforward way, because Forrest doesn’t know how to feel things any other way.

Despite this directness, the score is also surprisingly complex, with at least three main recurring major themes and a good half dozen minor motifs weaving together to create the score. The score’s most famous theme is, of course, the main ‘Feather’ theme, which bookends the score in the opening cue “I’m Forrest… Forrest Gump” and then again in the conclusive “I’ll Be Right Here”. A gorgeous, tender-hearted piano theme backed by elegant strings and light accents from guitars and woodwinds, it drifts by lazily, following the flight of a feather as it catches the wind and eventually comes to land on Forrest’s foot. The theme speaks directly to the film’s poignant core message about destiny and purpose – Forrest says, at one point, “I don’t know if we each have a destiny, or if we’re all just floating around accidental-like on a breeze, but I think maybe it’s both” – but more than that it is just an astonishingly beautiful piece of music, one of the finest main titles Silvestri has ever written.

The second major theme in the score is the theme for Jenny, Forrest’s lifelong love, to whom he remains constant despite the fact that she treats him terribly, an echo of the terrible way life has treated her. Hurt people hurt people, as they say. Jenny’s Theme is a warm, but slightly melancholic piece, initially orchestrated for clarinet and orchestra, and despite its superficial charm it has an inner sense of sadness, the reasons for which become clear as the film progresses. It is first introduced in “You Can Sit Here,” when young Forrest first meets young Jenny on the bus to school, and is a lovely acknowledgement of an innocent childhood friendship. The cascade of strings that often ends statements of the theme are just gorgeous, and its later reprises in cues like “Jenny Returns,” “Forrest Meets Forrest,” and “The Wedding Guest” are especially notable. The emotional impact of this theme in “Forrest Meets Forrest” is especially devastating; orchestrated here for intimate pianos, it underscores the scene where Forrest meets the son he didn’t know he had with Jenny for the first time, and his first instinct is to ask whether his son ‘is smart, or like him,’ between barely-suppressed sobs.

The third major theme in the film is the ‘running theme,’ which represents the ecstasy and exhilaration Forrest feels when he discovers that, not only does he not need leg braces, but that he can run ‘like the wind blows’. From that day on, if he was goin’ somewhere, he was running! It first appears in the aspirational “Run Forrest Run,” gradually picking up pace and scope until it explodes with joyous delight as young Forrest’s braces literally fall from his legs as he tries to run away from a gang of bullies. The theme also accompanies his years of footballing prowess at the University of Alabama in “The Crimson Gump,” during which Silvestri arranges the theme in a style similar to a college marching band, and then later it underscores the first section of his legendary run across the United States in “The Crusade,” a cue full of sparkling grandeur and endless, wondrous optimism.

However, in addition to these major themes, there are also a myriad of smaller themes and motifs which speak to the subtle emotional changes and shifting relationships in Forrest’s life. There is a pretty ‘childhood theme’ that represents Forrest’s idyllic early life in rural Alabama, a warm and lyrical piece for piano, strings, and clarinets, which has more than a touch of Georges Delerue elegance to it. On the soundtrack album it is heard prominently in “ You’re No Different,” but it is much more prevalent in the film itself, accompanying young Forrest throughout his formative years. A carefree variation on this theme represents the ‘peas and carrots’ relationship between young Jenny and young Forrest as they grow up; it appears prominently towards the end of “You Can Sit Here,” and then later in “That’s My Boat,” as Forrest remembers his childhood with Jenny and decides to name all the vessels in his shrimp fishing fleet after her.

There is also a theme which appears to be a sort of ‘destiny’ theme for Forrest and the way he changes the lives, for better or worse, of the people he meets. Specifically the theme appears to directly correlate to Forrest’s relationships with his mother, Jenny, Bubba, and Lieutenant Dan, and it usually appears during scenes of heightened emotions between Forrest and one of them. You first hear it at the 1:12 mark of “You Can Sit Here,” adding a secondary level of pathos to the scene where Forrest first meets Jenny on the school bus, and then later it appears arranged for flutes in “Pray With Me,” a deeply touching scene in which young Forrest and young Jenny run away from her abusive father, and she prays to God to ‘make me a bird so I can fly far, far away from here’.

Later in the film it speaks directly to the relationship between Forrest and Lieutenant Dan; in “I Had a Destiny” it underscores the devastating scene where an embittered Dan unleashes his fury on Forrest, saying that his destiny to die with honor in battle was ruined because, although Forrest saved his life, he lost the use of his legs. Then, in both “That’s My Boat” and “I Never Thanked You,” the motif underscores the scenes in which Forrest and Lieutenant Dan’s friendship becomes deeper and more profound, and Dan begins to accept the fact that he can still lead a full life despite his disability. The statement in “I Never Thanked You” is especially effective in context, as Silvestri’s warm strings accompany the scene of Lieutenant Dan leaping off Forrest’s boat and serenely swimming in the ocean, as the sun sets spectacularly on the horizon. Finally, in “The Wedding Guest,” Silvestri arranges the destiny theme in its fullest form for clarinets and warm, noble horns, as Dan arrives at Forrest and Jenny’s wedding wearing prosthetic ‘magic legs,’ with a fiancé of his own.

There are also several other one-off moments of note. There is a haunting theme that accompanies the scene of Forrest telling Jenny he is being packed off to war in “They’re Sending Me To Vietnam,” which features lyrical strings backed by subtle vocal textures like a hymn. There is a wonderful piece of sweeping romance in “Washington Reunion,” for the scene where Forrest and Jenny reconnect during an anti-war demonstration and embrace in the middle of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Elsewhere, there is a darker and more brooding motif for low brass and prominent percussion in “I Ran and I Ran,” underscoring the scene in Vietnam when he and his platoon are caught in an ambush and most of his comrades are wiped out, only for Forrest to show an incredible amount of heroism by literally carrying many of his friends – including Bubba and Lieutenant Dan – away from the line of fire.

The finale of the score begins with “Where Heaven Ends,” a deeply emotional moment where Forrest tells Jenny (who is dying of an unspecified disease, clearly insinuated to be AIDS) of all the times he thought of her over the years, and how those thoughts saved him from his darkest days, enduring the horrors of Vietnam, and while running across the country alone. Silvestri employs moody, shifting, almost abstract orchestral textures to evoke Forrest’s recollections, subtly referencing several thematic ideas without ever directly quoting them, almost as if they were coming from some sort of half-forgotten dream. Then, at the beginning of the devastating “Jenny’s Grave,” Silvestri gently quotes the ‘peas and carrots’ version of the childhood theme as he remembers the carefree years he spent with Jenny, playing in the tree under which she is now buried; the rest of the cue explores a series of tender, expressive passages for light strings, pianos, delicate woodwinds, and magical harps, before eventually segueing into the final statement of the feather theme in “I’ll Be Right Here”.

The conclusive “Suite from Forrest Gump” offers a magnificent 6½-minute reprise of all the score’s main thematic ideas, absent the Feather theme, including especially wonderful versions of Jenny’s theme, the Running theme, the Childhood theme, and the poignant hymnal theme from “They’re Sending Me To Vietnam”.

Forrest Gump is a magnificent score which, as I mentioned before, remains my personal favorite Alan Silvestri work. I admit that I am entirely biased due to my enduring love of the film itself, and the deep emotional connection that exists between it, me, and my mom, but even taking this into account, there is still a lot to admire. The thematic density and intellectual architecture of the score is not something that is immediately obvious, but once you start to delve into its intricacies, it is hard not to be impressed. The emotional content of the score is second to none; even if some harsh critics feel like they are being manipulated by it, I say ‘so what’ – the whole point of film is to make you feel something, and Silvestri does that here superbly. Stupid is as stupid does, critics. Finally, the central Feather theme is one of Silvestri’s most memorable and enduring musical creations, and will likely go down as one of the most iconic melodies of his entire career. According to Forrest’s mama, life is like a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re gonna get. Well, with this score, you know exactly what you’re gonna get: film music magic. And that’s all I have to say about that.

Buy the Forrest Gump soundtrack from the Movie Music UK Store

Track Listing:

• I’m Forrest… Forrest Gump (2:41)
• You’re No Diff’rent (1:00)
• You Can Sit Here (2:26)
• Run Forrest Run (2:14)
• Pray With Me (0:58)
• The Crimson Gump (1:08)
• They’re Sending Me To Vietnam (2:23)
• I Ran and Ran (1:43)
• I Had a Destiny (1:19)
• Washington Reunion (0:45)
• Jesus On The Main Line (traditional, arr. Alan Silvestri, feat. Donnie Gerrard) (2:00)
• That’s My Boat (1:16)
• I Never Thanked You (0:47)
• Jenny Returns (2:43)
• The Crusade (2:01)
• Forrest Meets Forrest (1:41)
• The Wedding Guest (1:48)
• Where Heaven Ends (1:33)
• Jenny’s Grave (1:26)
• I’ll Be Right Here (0:49)
• Suite from Forrest Gump (6:34)

Epic Soundtrax EK-66430 (1994)

Running Time: 39 minutes 15 seconds

Music composed and conducted by Alan Silvestri. Orchestrations by William Ross. Recorded and mixed by Dennis Sands. Edited by Ken Karman. Album produced by Alan Silvestri.