Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Forrest Gump
1994 · Robert Zemeckis · Forrest Gump on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch where Forrest stands when history happens around him. (staging)
Zemeckis puts Hanks still at the center while crowds, soldiers, officials and reporters move around him. Hanks reacts. Everyone else in the frame does the acting.
Payoff: He never drives the events he joins, which is why the film can walk him through three decades. In the reading: le faussaire (the forger). The reading calls Forrest a forger: a blank man who slips into every scene and makes the fabricated past hold.
Watch the archival news footage for seams where Hanks was added. (camera)
ILM composited Hanks into real footage of Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, reworking the presidents' mouths to speak new lines. The grain and the light match, and the joins do not show.
Payoff: You are watching a real afternoon rewritten, and the film counts on you believing it anyway. In the reading: powers of the false. The reading calls this the powers of the false: staged and real are welded so tightly you stop sorting them.
Look at the cars, signs and haircuts in each new scene. (setting)
Rick Carter's design changes wholesale every few minutes, from a 1950s Alabama boarding house to a Vietnam jungle to a shrimp boat. Each decade is legible in one glance.
Payoff: The film leaps years without explaining itself, so the props do the work of telling you when you are.
Listen for the moment a period pop record takes over. (sound)
Zemeckis drops in rock, soul and folk songs constantly. Underneath them Alan Silvestri's piano and strings theme keeps returning, the same few bars every time the film wants you to feel something.
Payoff: The songs date the scene and the score carries the sentiment. You can hear the film choosing which job it needs.
Notice Hanks's posture: squared shoulders, still hands, level voice. (performance)
Hanks holds one soft Southern cadence and one fixed carriage across forty years of screen time. Robin Wright's Jenny changes constantly beside him, her hair, clothes and manner shifting each decade.
Payoff: His constancy is the film's measuring stick. You read every era by how far it has moved from him.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Forrest never changes and never decides. Watch what the film moves around him, and how smoothly it fakes the past.