Forrest Gump (1994) Directed by Robert Zemekis starring Tom Hanks, Robin Wright Penn, Gary Sinise,
Sally Field, Mykelti Williamson
The movie begins with a feather falling to the feet of
Forrest Gump sitting at a bus stop in Savannah,
Georgia. Forrest picks up the feather and puts it in the book Curious George, then tells the story of his life to a woman seated next to him. The listeners at the bus stop change regularly throughout his narration, each showing a different attitude ranging from disbelief and indifference to rapt veneration.
Forrest is shown to have been taught much about life by his mother. He often recalls her favorite sayings, including "Life is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you're gonna get" and "Stupid is as stupid does." Forrest's story begins as a young child who is mentally slow and has braces on his legs. He is a descendant and namesake of Nathan Bedford Forrest,
Confederate general and alleged founder of the Ku Klux
Klan. His mother knows her child is not particularly intelligent but provides for him the best she can, inviting boarders into their large house, one of which is a young
Elvis Presley who learns his famous hip gyrations from
Forrest's awkward attempts to dance in leg braces.
Gump meets President
Kennedy
On Forrest's first day of school, he meets Jenny
Curran, and immediately falls in love with her. Jenny lives on a farm house near Forrest's home with her physically and sexually abusive, alcoholic father. His leg braces and mental handicap make Forrest a popular target for bullies at school. One day while walking home from school, a few children start throwing rocks at Forrest, and Jenny tells him, "Run, Forrest, Run!" As the bullies chase him on their bikes, the braces on his legs break and fall off, leaving him able to run very fast. After that, wherever he needs to go, he runs and one day runs through University of Alabama football practice led by Bear Bryant. This event leads to him getting a college scholarship for football. He is named to the 1963 All-American Team and meets President John F.
Kennedy at the White House. While there, Forrest drinks 15 bottles of Dr Pepper "since it's free". Over a handshake President Kennedy asks him how he feels, to which Gump replies "I gotta pee." Throughout college, Forrest continues to try to visit Jenny, who goes to an all-girls' school.
After college, he enlists in the army, where he meets two other people who will shape his life: Benjamin
Buford "Bubba" Blue, a young shrimper who serves with Forrest in the Vietnam War and knows "everything there is to know about the shrimpin' business"; and Lieutenant Dan Taylor, Forrest and Bubba's commanding officer. Bubba and Forrest plan to go into the shrimping business together after they go home, and Forrest listens as Bubba tells him all he knows about shrimping. When their platoon is suddenly attacked in the jungle, Forrest rescues Lieutenant Dan and other soldiers. He goes back for Bubba and carries him back to the others, getting shot himself, but Bubba dies when the evacuation choppers arrive.
While recuperating, Forrest is introduced to ping-pong and becomes very good at it. At the same time,
Lieutenant Dan, who lost both of his legs due to his injuries, is having a hard time coping with his Vietnam experience, or more accurately, his survival of them; he has relatives that have died in every American war.
In one dramatic scene, Lieutenant Dan asks Forrest if he knows what it is like to not be able to walk, which
Forrest does because of his earlier leg braces, but in telling him so Forrest only infuriates Lieutenant Dan as he cannot articulate it well. For his injuries, Forrest is awarded the Medal of Honor, which further infuriates
Lieutenant Dan, and he gets to meet the president.

Throughout the film, we see short glimpses of Jenny's life. She has become a hippie. While Forrest is in
Washington, D.C. to receive his medal, he stumbles onto a peace rally. Forrest meets Abbie Hoffman and makes a speech, but a military general unplugged Forrest's microphone, causing his words to be inaudible to most of the crowd. Hoffman emotionally thanks Forrest following the speech. After his speech, he finds himself reunited with Jenny, who was also there. They spend some time together, including attending a
Black Panther party - which Forrest is thrown out of - but Jenny eventually returns to San Francisco. Further glimpses into Jenny's life reveal that she has slipped into drug abuse, relationships with abusive men, and prostitution. At one point, she contemplates suicide, getting up on a railing to jump off a building.
Gump meets President Nixon
Forrest's skills at ping-pong take him to China, and get him money from an endorsement of a ping-pong paddle. From these endeavors, he meets
President Richard Nixon, who asks him where he is staying, and then offers to put Forrest up in a much nicer hotel, which turns out to be the
Watergate office and hotel complex. Forrest calls the front desk after he sees flashlights across the courtyard, bringing attention to the Watergate burglars and precipitating Nixon's downfall. He also meets Dick Cavett and John Lennon on Cavett's talk show, and his accounts of China inspire Lennon's song "Imagine".
Forrest uses the money from ping-pong to carry out his and Bubba's plan, going to Alabama and buying a shrimp boat. He has no success at it. Lieutenant Dan had told Forrest if he ever followed through, Dan would become Forrest's first mate; while he meant it as a joke, Dan still turns up at the dock. Even with
Lieutenant Dan aiding him, Forrest's luck does not improve, so Dan tells him to pray.
Lieutenant Dan is still struggling with his Vietnam experiences, and when Hurricane Carmen hits the Gulf of
Mexico in summer 1974, he and Forrest are out in the gulf on their boat with Lieutenant Dan screaming at
God as manifested by the storm. The hurricane destroys all of the docked boats, leaving theirs as the only shrimp boat in the area. With no competition, business booms. Forrest insists on paying Bubba's share of the profits to his family; Lieutenant Dan invests the rest. One of the investments, Apple Computer, (which
Gump calls a "fruit company"), makes them both rich. Forrest leaves the shrimp business when his mother dies, returning home to Greenbow.
Jenny comes to visit Forrest during the United States Bicentennial. Forrest proposes marriage to Jenny. She turns him down, but later that evening, she makes love to him and says that she does love him. In the morning she disappears.
After discovering this, Forrest feels like going for a run, but instead of returning home he continues, eventually becoming famous for running across the country for three years, two months, fourteen days and sixteen hours and sparking the running craze of the 70's. He is called "a gardener from Greenbow,
Alabama", in news reports about his country-length runs in reference to his cutting the football field for free, because he likes to do it so much, after the shrimping business took off.
Forrest is waiting at the bus stop because on 30 March, 1981, he received a letter from Jenny who, having seen him run on television, asks him to visit her. Forrest shows Jenny's letter to the current listener, a patient elderly lady who has already passed up one bus to continue listening; she tells him that the address is only a short walking distance away. He thanks the lady and immediately starts running. Once he is reunited with Jenny and her young son, Jenny tells him that the boy is named Forrest, after his father, whom he at first incorrectly believes to be the son of another man named Forrest, although she then confirms that the child is indeed his. She also tells Forrest she is suffering from a virus (probably AIDS, though this is never definitively stated).
[1][2][3] Together the three move back to Greenbow, Alabama. Jenny and Forrest finally marry, but their married bliss is cut short by Jenny's death "on a Saturday morning" according to Forrest. Her gravestone gives her date of death as 22 March, 1982, though it was, in fact, a
Monday. Forrest has Jenny buried under the tree where they played as children, and has her abusive father's house torn down.
The film ends with Forrest escorting his son to a school bus, where the father and son tell each other that they love each other. The feather in Forrest's book is blown away by the wind, and floats into the sky, echoing the film's beginning

These were some of the events covered in the movie:
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