Forrest Gump - Winston Groom
My Rating: 5/5
I must have watched the movie “Forrest Gump” at least a dozen times by now, and twice in the theatre, the first time when it was released, I was in Noida, the second time I watched it in the Pragati Maidan movie festival (New Delhi). And I must say, every time I watched it, I loved it more. Tom Hanks was totally amazing and in character as Forrest Gump, doing some idiotic things, but to the audience's shock and amazement, everything he touches turns to gold. Just like the love of his life, Jenny tells him at the very start, that whenever he feels he is in trouble, he should “Run, Run Forrest Run”. And that mantra takes him to unbelievable heights. On the other hand, his own mother doesn’t accept at any cost that her child was special, if you know what I mean. Now let’s come back to the main question, after all these years, after watching the movie so many times, I never picked up the lovely book by Winston Groom on which it is based. Winston Groom even partnered to write the movie too, making it not only visually delightful but leaving a lot of deep meaning in between too; it never loses the gist his terrific book offers. As the book cover rightly says, in P.J. O’Rourke’s words, that “Winston Groom has created the ideal citizen for the modern world - a perfect idiot”. The greatest strength of both the book and movie both is the way it is narrated by Forrest Gump himself and the satire behind almost everything he does or happens to him.
But as it is always the case, the book is far, far better than the movie and offers so much more character to Forrest and his story, right from childhood to the end, which I wouldn’t like to disclose for those who have neither read nor watched the movie yet (can there actually be someone like that?). The way his mother helps and raises him, on top of that, the way his life changes after Jenny comes into it and goes out of it pretty often to break his heart. Jenny herself has her own painful story to tell, and the small revenge that Forrest takes for her in the end was so heart-touching. How he ends up getting a college degree just by running in any direction, and becomes a world football (rugby) champion too, is a hilarious story. How many presidents he meets, how they all get killed, the legendary Elvis Presley's dancing steps to his travel to space and back with an Orangutang who becomes a friend for life. From almost getting eaten by cannibals to learning chess from one of them to becoming a professional wrestler, it has so much of him. His army mate Bubba, who plays a huge character in his life and their shared dream, which later Forrest fulfils and makes them all millionaires, his boss Lt Dane, one heck of a man and a perfect mentor for Forrest. His histrionics in ping pong and how he offends the Chinese, who were supposed to be the masters of the game, was one hell of an episode from his life. The book and Forrest’s story have so much heart that I never wanted it to finish, but with hardly 250+ pages, I could only stretch it to five days. But there is a catch, that there is a sequel to this one, and I need to lay my hands on it at the earliest. And on top of that, if I tell you what it is about, that will be a huge spoiler for this one :), so, you’ve got to read it for yourself and very well follow it with the multiple Oscar-winning movie, which actually got Tom Hanks, I believe, his first best actor Oscar award.
I must say why I enjoyed the book so much was because of Tom Hanks, as the way Forrest’s character talks in the book, bad English and almost no grammar, is exactly how Tom has done in the movie and that kept giving me visuals at the back of my head throughout the story. Although Winston Forrest is six feet six inches and bulky, barring that, Tom is almost a perfect fit for the character. Its visuals and background score do so much justice to Winston’s writing, and no wonder why it got so many awards and acclaim. If the truth be told, the book didn’t sell well initially; only 30k copies got sold, but once the movie came out, it sold more than a million copies. Do let me know if you have read the book and watched the movie, just like me and loved them both big time. Also, have you read anything else by Winston Groom? I will surely be looking forward to reading some more from him once I am done with this one’s sequel first.
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