Forrest Gump (Chocolate Box Gift Set) DVD Review

Posted by Jeremy Thomas on 11.30.2009

This DVD set is like a box of chocolates...literally. But is it worth a double-dip?

Directed by: Robert Zemeckis
Written by: Eric Roth

Starring:
Tom Hanks - Forrest Gump
Robin Wright Penn - Jenny Curran
Gary Sinise - Dan Taylor
Mykelti Williamson - Benjamin Buford "Bubba" Blue
Sally Field - Mrs. Gump
Haley Joel Osment - Forrest Gump, Jr.
Michael Conner Humphreys - Young Forrest Gump.
Hanna R. Hall - Young Jenny Curran
Richard D'Alessandro - Abbie Hoffman
Peter Dobson - Elvis Presley
Dick Cavett - Himself
Sam Anderson - Principal Hancock
Geoffrey Blake - Wesley
Siobhan Fallon Hogan - Dorothy Harris

Domestic Gross: $329,694,499
Worldwide Gross: $677,387,716

DVD Release Date: 11/3/09
Running Time: 142 Minutes



Rated PG-13 for drug content, some sensuality and war violence.


It's hard to believe that it has been nearly fifteen years since the 67th Academy Awards. That year was one of the more hotly-contested years in recent memory, as two critical juggernauts on very different sides of the filmmaking spectrum came head-to-head. The first, Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, was a film that enormously influenced the prominence of independent filmmaking and put Tarantino on the map. With heavily stylized violence, a script whose language would make sailors cringe and an over-the-top "cool factor," the film was the dream story of a new generation of filmgoers. In the other corner were Robert Zemeckis, a director who had long been working in Hollywood, and his slice of Americana known as Forrest Gump. Featuring Tom Hanks in the starring role, Zemeckis's film was a nostalgic look at America's history put up against an anti-heroic vision of the new generation of film-makers. When the dust had settled, Gump stood taller, having earned six Academy Awards of Fiction's single win for Best Adapted Screenplay. The success of Forrest Gump helped set Hanks in an entirely new class of cinematic respect and did the same with Zemeckis. The film first got a DVD release in 2001 with a Two-Disc Collector's Edition; for its fifteenth anniversary, Paramount has decided to rerelease the set in special packaging as a "Chocolate Box Gift Set" just in time for Christmas.

The Movie

Hanks stars as the titular character, a simpleton who finds himself travelling through some of the most significant moments of the latter half of the twentieth century. Born to a noble—if not financially well-off—single Southern woman (Fields), Forrest is born with a crooked spine and a below-average IQ. While Mrs. Gump repeatedly tells him that he is no worse or different than anyone else, other people do not agree and mock him repeatedly. One person who doesn't is Jenny (Wright Penn, played by Hall as a child). Jenny accepts him for who he is, and she becomes Forrest's love for life. While his journeys separate him from Jenny and she strays into the excess of the sixties and the seventies, she is always in his thoughts. Forrest's extraordinary nature—his strong legs, his single-minded nature, his simple and uncomplicated outlook and his hand-eye coordination—takes him to great places, and introduces him to great people. In Vietnam, he meets Lieutenant Dan Taylor (Sinise) and Bubba Blue (Williamson), both of whom affect Forrest as much as he affects them. He meets no less than three Presidents of the United States, plays ping-pong for the United States against China, earns the Congressional Medal of Honor and captures the nation's attention by running for over three years. Through it all he always comes home to his mother, and crosses paths with Jenny, enriching the lives of those around him and proving his mother's words true, that "life is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you're gonna get."

Eric Roth penned the screenplay to Forrest Gump, based on the novel by Winston Groom. The differences between Groom's story and Roth's screenplay are pronounced, with Groom's book being more of a stretch in terms of the suspension of disbelief. His novel is a farcical tale that includes Forrest running for Senate under the slogan "I've gotta pee" and joining the space program, where he meets a life-long friend in the male orangutan Sue who becomes his partner in the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company. Roth took out the sillier elements of the film and inserted several sequences of his own to make the story a more heartfelt story about the humanity of a decent man, whose simplicity allows him to navigate the tumultuous second half of the twentieth century and not be weighed down by it. Roth's Forrest is a childlike character, a truly good man who by nature of his simplicity boils things down to their best elements.

At the same time, the world around him is not so good. His lifelong love Jenny finds herself falling into the hippie movement and pays for it with abuse, emotional trauma and, eventually, disease. Lieutenant Dan's hardship throws him into a tailspin that he is unable to recover from without Forrest's help. Many have debated the political leanings of the film, with Forrest living a clean and conservative lifestyle while those who suffer around him—particularly Jenny—are suffering as a result of their immersion into the counterculture lifestyle of excess. It can be noted that in adapting the novel, Roth seemed to take all of the things Forrest does wrong and transfers them to his more liberal would-be girlfriend. Still, the story doesn't seem to be mean-spirited and in Forrest, there is a constant acceptance of what Jenny does, even if he doesn't understand it. While the argument can be made for political leanings, the film seems to ultimately stand from a neutral point of view, and the conclusion of Jenny's story seems to imply redemption and maturity. The story is less about political archetypes than it is individuals who take different paths throughout the wild era, and in the end we are supposed to love them all.

Therein lies part of the problem with the film. While a first viewing of Forrest Gump leaves plenty of opportunity for amazement and wonder, successive viewings allow the flaws to seep out more. When viewed objectively and not through Forrest's eyes, Jenny really is an abhorrent sort of character. It's clear that she loves Forrest, and part of her motivation for coming back to Forrest time and again is because he's safe, and he can care for her or pick her up when she's down. The situation is less pronounced with some others, but even Lt. Dan is a character who would have become very little without his slow friend to help him out and save him. The only characters who appear saintly are the Gumps—Forrest through his simplicity and Mrs. Gump through a single-minded devotion to her son. Any character outside of these ones and Bubba Blue are little more than caricatures, and they prove to be one-dimensional types who don't hold up to scrutiny. Jenny's boyfriend is an abusive revolutionary type. The girls who Lt. Dan and Forrest take home are just spiteful call girls. The people sitting on the bench with Forrest might as well be called Ms. Bored And Uncaring, Mr. Disbelieving and Ms. Nice Woman Who Believes. No one gets much screen time and so there isn't enough to develop them.

The other problem with the script is that by midway through, it starts to drag. Once Forrest has returned home from Vietnam, the story starts to crawl and loses direction. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that, with as many iconic appearances in historical events as we see up until then, there's simply nothing so interesting to hold sway there. Even some of those historical events seem to be rather unnecessary. Forrest's appearance at George Wallace's historic attempt to prevent the desegregation comes off like a cinematic version of "Where's Waldo," and the appearance on the Dick Cavett show where he inspires John Lennon with the lyrics to "Imagine" seems tacked on just for the gag—one that doesn't work. The meetings with the President come off much better, though it is admittedly bizarre to see Lyndon Johnson leaning in to murmur that he'd like to see Gump's wounded buttock and then when it happens, he gets a strange grin on his face. In the end, the story picks up and finishes on a generally satisfying note, but still leaves the story flawed as a whole.

What makes this film, without a shadow of a doubt, are the performances. Tom Hanks was coming of an Oscar-winning performance in Philadelphia, a move that redefined him in many people's eyes. He furthered that here and solidified his status as one of the top dramatic men in Hollywood. He handles Forrest in a way that no one else could have, balancing the character's age and innocence perfectly. There isn't a single moment where Hanks allows his character to fall into anywhere less than near-perfection, and moments such as Jenny's revelation in the present day show what a talented actor Hanks is. In the hands of nearly any other actor, the character simply wouldn't have worked—and if the character didn't work, the film would have failed drastically. Hanks is exceptional in the role which remains one of his best pieces of work.

That is to say nothing against his supporting cast. Robin Wright Penn hits all the right notes as Jenny Curran. She is a deeply flawed character but it is through Wright Penn that we can accept and even appreciate her. She plays Jenny with the right touches of love for Forrest and hatred for herself, and in that we can understand better why she does what she does. Gary Sinise was deservedly nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Award for Lt. Dan, who also could have become a one-note joke in the hands of a lesser actor. Sally Fields provides stability as Forrest's mother and Mykelti Williamson is very memorable as Bubba Blue. This movie is a perfect convergence of casting and performances, and they are what allow the film to succeed.

Robert Zemeckis has proven himself to be a talented and capable director over the years. His early success came with comedy, between the Back to the Future franchise and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Forrest Gump was his first experience with a more dramatic piece and he does several things well. The primary thing he does well is the visual effects, which at the time were second to none. They may seem trite and standard fare now, but in 1994 digitally removing a man's legs, inserting actors into archival footage and taking 1,500 extras to make a crowd of over 50,000 were amazing accomplishments and with Industrial Light and Magic on the job, Zemeckis allows these effects to soar. Some of them have not aged particularly well—particularly the morphing of certain famous people's mouths to match words or a moment when Dan climbs into his wheelchair—but they still stand as hallmarks of visual effects. Where Zemeckis fails is in allowing the movie to wander too much. He makes no attempts to rein in Roth's script and instead is focused on letting the actors and effects people wow the audience. That's all well and good, but for a film that could have been so much more, Zemeckis lets it falter. He knows he is making a fantasy, albeit a more reality-based one than Back to the Future, and he expects his audience to just play along. That works the first time around; however, once the glamour has worn off the flaws creep forth and what becomes evident is that while Forrest Gump is a good film that has wrapped itself firmly around Americana, that doesn't make it a great film.

Film Rating: 7.0

The Video

This is basically an identical DVD to the 2001 Two-Disc Collector's Edition, right down to the video and audio transfers. That leaves Forrest Gump with a good, though not perfect, video experience. The first flaws can be noticed early on in the opening title sequence, where distortion can be seen in the lettering. Delineation is not as clean as it could have been and a lot of images come off too soft. On the other hand, the colors and black levels are very nicely done. There are some noticeable levels of grain and digital artifacts can be seen on higher-end televisions. Some scenes look quite crisp, while others less so. The last thing that is unfortunate is that the DVD transfer allows us to see flaws in the effects, which were fine fifteen years ago but are more noticeable now. This last problem takes very little points off as there is only so much that can be done to improve it without tinkering, and Zemeckis must be commended for resisting the temptation to go in and "improve" things the way Spielberg and Lucas have on their films.

Video Rating: 7.0

The Audio

Like the video, the audio is the same as in the 2001 DVD set, but unlike the video the audio comes through excellently. The ambient sounds are quite striking, particularly in the Vietnam scenes where all the channels get quite a workout. Alan Silvestri's now-famous score sounds beautiful and the dialogue is never difficult to understand. There are no major amounts of hissing to be heard and all in all, the Dolby Digital 5.1 track sounds quite nice. There is also a French Stereo Surround track. Subtitles are available in English.

Audio Rating: 8.0

The Packaging

For this fifteenth anniversary release, Paramount has housed the DVD set in a "Chocolate Box Gift Set" casing. Of course, with the possibility someone being dumb enough to actually eat entirely-too-old candy, there are no actual chocolates inside. Instead we have the two-disc set, a fourteen page booklet called "The Journey of Forrest Gump" that features a timeline of Forrest's life and pictures, a covering with scratch n' sniff chocolates and a fake feather. The box is a bit hefty to fit on a home DVD shelf, but makes for a nice centerpiece somewhere in the house if one doesn't mind the DVD's being separate from the rest of their collection. The menus on the DVD's feature such images as the feather, Forrest's dog tags, or faded images of the characters with easily navigable menus alongside of them. It all looks excellent, but for ease of storage or practicality it's a bit much.

Packaging Rating: 8.0

Special Features

Audio Commentary with director Robert Zemeckis, producer Steve Starkey and production designer Rick Carter: There are two commentary tracks, both directly ported from the previous DVD release. The first features Zemeckis, Starkey and Carter talking at length about various aspects of the film. They tackle the pre-production process, establishing the look of the film, casting decisions and design and location choices. They sometimes run a little dry and the track is hurt somewhat by the fact that Zemeckis is recorded separately from Starkey and Carter. Still, the information is definitely worth checking out and they never become intolerable to listen to the way some tracks can get.

Audio Commentary with producer Wendy Finerman: Finerman talks alone on this track, when she talks. Periods of dead air abound in this one, which causes it to sink a bit, but it's certainly better than it would have been if she just babbled on about banal details to fill time. Additionally, the information she offers is interesting enough, with anecdotes and nice stories about the production.

Through the Eyes of Forrest Gump: A Documentary: (30:04) Made at the time of the film's release, this documentary short is the making-of for the film, and starts off with Tom Hanks, Sally Field and others talking about Forrest intercut with appropriate scenes from the footage. Robert Zemeckis talks about how Forrest is an opportunity to tell "the tapestry of American history." Producer Wendy Finerman talks about her experiences having first read the book, and Zemeckis talks about how it was interesting to him because it defied the conventional rules of movie-making by not having a central conflict to drive the film forward. Tom Hanks does an amusing impression of Robert Zemeckis and his reaction to the script before they start talking about the cast. Zemeckis gushes over Hanks while the actor talks about the character's state of mind. Mrs. Gump, the young Forrest (who Hanks credits with inspiring his idea for the voice), Jenny and more. There's some nice information provided here, but nothing too terribly in-depth. They talk about the character's interactions with famous people throughout the film and focus a bit on putting Hanks in the JFK scene. Zemeckis talks about framing Vietnam from Forrest's point of view and we get Mykelti Williamson talking about Bubba, Sinise talking about Lt. Dan. Hanks talks a bit about capturing the reality of Vietnam without doing the same old, same old before they move onto the ping-pong shots and how they accomplished that. Discussion is also had over filming on the shrimp boat, getting the hurricane scene done, the feather scene (the longest effects shot in history at the time) and then some summary. As a half-hour look at the film it is definitely interesting, without going so far in-depth that it bogs down.

Screen Tests: (9:21) This set of features are a grouping of scene tests for the duo Michael Conner Humphrey and Hanna R. Hall, Robin Wright and Haley Joel Osment. They are exactly what one might expect from screen tests, featuring the cast members doing snippets scenes to see how they work on camera. Humphrey and Hall show their immediate chemistry, though Humphrey clearly had some lessons by the time he got to filming. Wright and Osment do their scenes with Hanks, who speaks without his famous "Forrest voice." Again, the chemistry is definitely there from the get-go and you can see exactly why these actors were cast in their roles; Wright shows the innocence and sympathy she brings to the role right off the bat and Osment is very endearing.

Building The World Of Forrest Gump: (7:18) Production Designer Rick Carter starts this piece by describing the process behind what the production designers and art directors do, and then moves on to talk about how he got the project and what it was to him. He talks about location scouting to find a place that looked like the South the way they wanted it to be, and discusses the building of the house and other sets. He talks about the challenges of making Vietnam and setting it up exactly the way Zemeckis wanted, and the challenges of doing so much work so quickly. Carter is engaging to listen to, but he only offers a few tidbits of real value here.

Seeing Is Believing: The Visual Effects of Forrest Gump: (38:35) This is actually a series of shorter featurettes that cover individual effects sets. We have the Birth of a Nation scene, in which George Murphy and Ken Ralston talk about how they set that up from the still picture through the footage, which involved some use of rotoscoping technology. Ralston talks about doing some special effects for Forrest running from the teenagers chasing him, as well as an unused sequence involving Martin Luther King that was better off cut as it probably would have been a bit much. We get a couple of minutes about Forrest standing next to George Wallace before they move onto Vietnam for a good seven minutes. This is more of an overview of several scenes where Ralston shows us how Zemeckis tends to show us a lot of information with a quick pan shot. Ralston also talks about the effects of the combat scenes along with the stunt teams. There's another unused scene of Gump playing Ping-Pong with George Bush Sr. and then the Johnson, Lennon and Nixon scenes, which added a new layer of complexity with the use of color. Other shorts involve "Enhancing Reality," which was the crowd replication for the Reflecting Pool, football and ping-pong scenes, and an almost six-minute scene about the removal of Sinise's legs as Lt. Dan.

Through The Ears Of Forrest Gump: (14:36) This set of five featurettes is about the sound design, and mostly features sound man Randy Thom in interviews. He talks about how they framed the slow motion of young Forrest running from bullies and how much of an opportunity he found that to enhance the scene with the sounds of the bicycles in a microscopic effect in the first bit, and then reminisces on how big of a project it was to make it seem like there were more people in the football stadium than there really was. Like in the visual effects, the Vietnam scenes get a lot more time and Thom talks about how he came on board and what opportunities he found in the film. He covers the sounds in relation to camera placement and trying to make it seem more like it came from the perspective of the soldiers, and how the entirety of the sound was recorded separate from the direct filming of the scene. This is definitely the best of the sound featurettes as you learn a lot about the technical details of sound mixing and all the different aspects that come into play. The last bit is about the ping-pong scenes and how they created the sounds of the ball, which was all done post-production like the Vietnam scenes were. Thom is an intelligent speaker who makes this all very interesting and well-worth listening to.

The Magic Of Make-Up: (8:01) Make-Up Artists Dan Striepeke, who was one of the many people associated with this film that was nominated for an Academy Award, talks about how he got on the film to start this off, which was by virtue of working with Hanks as far back as Dragnet and The 'Burbs. He talks about particularly about using hair effects throughout the different years of Forrest's life and how his make-up partner did all the work on Jenny. There's discussion of the age make-up on Fields and Gary Sinise's facial hair and look. There's also a brief bit about Bubba's lip and how that was done. This is quite standard as make-up featurettes go and there isn't anything as fascinating offered here as there were in the effects scenes, perhaps because the make-up just wasn't as revolutionary. That's not to say it's overly boring, just not absolutely thrilling.

Trailers: (5:06) There are two trailers included; the original theatrical trailer and one entitled "Remember." The latter appears to have been a trailer used some time into the film's theatrical run, perhaps toward the end of the year to drum up support for the Oscars. Both are very good as trailers and certainly did their job in getting people to go see the film.

Photo Gallery: The Photo Gallery consists of twenty-nine still photos, both promotional shots and a few behind-the-scenes stills. They are good pictures, though there is nothing particular special or can't-miss about them. The navigation is controlled via the left/right arrows on the remote control.

Special Features Rating: 8.5

The 411: On its own, Forrest Gump is a film that, if not perfect or even a great piece of cinema, definitely stands as one that deserves a spot in most DVD collections. Tom Hanks, Robin Wright Penn, Gary Sinise and Sally Field are all excellent in their roles while director Robert Zemeckis takes what was at the time new leaps in digital technology. This does its best to make up for a flawed but serviceable script from Eric Roth, who would end up telling a similar story in far better fashion in 2008 with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. In the end, the movie is certainly one that can be enjoyed, but one must consciously avoid noticing the flaws to truly get swept up in the zeitgeist Zemeckis wants us to see. The biggest problem with this set is that it's an unnecessary double-dip. For those who own an earlier DVD release it is completely unnecessary. Anyone who doesn't have the old copy though may well find this under the Christmas tree, which would not be the worst gift by any stretch.

Final Score:  7.5   [ Good ]