Mostly, though, I’m sure she breathed deeply and smiled, for him, for years, because she loved him, and because she took a vow—and, hey, he forgave her for the way she tended to nag. Night after night, she lost him to the lab, the empty bed cold beside her, but this was his thing, and she loved him, and he promised her it would be “worth it.”
WELL, GUESS WHAT, WAYNE? IT HAS NOT BEEN WORTH IT.
YOU SHRUNK THE KIDS.
YOU SHRUNK ’EM.
And now, I’m sorry, you want me to what? Climb into this harness so you can dangle me over our lawn with a magnifying glass in hopes of saving our only two living children—whom I fed with my blood and pushed out of my body and WHOM YOU SHRUNK—from being killed by a scorpion?? Why do we even have scorpions in our lawn, Wayne? WHERE THE FUCK DO WE LIVE????
It’s survivable, though. Again, this is the work of love. Any good couples therapist will tell you: sometimes the dork you married accidentally shrinks the kids and they get imprisoned in a Lego by a scorpion and their pet ant sacrifices himself to save them and they ride the dog into the house and then your son falls into the Cheerios and your husband almost eats him for breakfast and then your husband reverses the shrink ray and re-biggens them all again and you all eat a big turkey.
She could do it. They could make it.
But now imagine.
Now imagine.
You’ve gone through the Herculean task of forgiving your husband for all of that. You’ve healed, slowly, with trepidation but also with grace. You’ve made it through. You’ve moved to a new town, had a new baby, found a fresh start. Parts of you are still raw, but you know that forgiveness is growth and those scars will make the pair of you stronger than before. This is your person, and he’s worth it, and he’s learned.
And then. After all that. Just three years later. Only three! Your husband comes to you.
Again.
“Honey.”
“Yeah?”
“Honey.”
“…”
“I blew up the baby.”
RATING: 3/10 DVDs of The Fugitive.
Dude, You Gotta Stop Listening to Your Mom
We open with a feather, which is a metaphor. You see, because it’s white, like Tom Hanks, and you want it to stay away from you, like the Vietnam War. Also this feather shot JFK.
After falling off a disgusting bird somewhere, the feather floats over and lands on Tom Hanks’s foot. Tom Hanks plays Forrest Gump, our hero, currently waiting for the bus with childlike wonder and also bothering this elderly woman who is just trying to live. Gump picks up the feather (UGH, DON’T TOUCH IT) and presses it between the pages of Curious George, his favorite book. Congrats. Now your suitcase has bird mites.
“Hello!” Gump says to the lady. “My name’s Forrest. Forrest Gump. You want a chock-lit? I could eat about a million of these. My momma always said life is like a box of chock-lits. You never know what you’re gonna get.” I mean, you mostly know. They write it on the lid.
Then the lady tells Gump that her feet hurt and she JUST WANTS TO GO HOME, so, naturally, he launches into his entire life story.
Small Gump goes to the doctor with his mom (Sally Field, who apparently gave birth to him when she was ten) to get fitted with some leg braces because “his back’s as crooked as a politician.” Gump reminisces about his ancestral namesake, General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Fortunately, Gump, much like that filthy feather, is too pure to understand what racism is, so he thinks that the Klan was a sort of slumber party club where “they’d even put bedsheets on they horses and ride around.”
Now, I guess that little rhetorical loophole (which serves the twofold goals of emphasizing Gump’s naivete and keeping this feel-good movie max digestible) is better than just not addressing how fucking racist Alabama was in the 1950s, but I can’t help feeling like Gump was AGGRESSIVELY failed by the system. Like, he’s no brainiac, but he’s capable of understanding basic concepts! If he can follow the rules of Ping-Pong to the letter, he can grasp the idea that some white people think they’re better than Black people. Instead, apparently everyone just tapped out hard on Forrest’s education, like, “Oh, he’s a little slow. Let’s NEVER TELL HIM ANYTHING.”
Then, the worst character from Lost (FUCKING BERNARD) shows up (WILL YOU NEVER LEAVE ME BE, FELL GHOUL?) and tells Sally Field that if she wants Gump to go to his school, she’s going to have to build a giant SOS sign out of rocks…IN HIS PANTS.
Actually, the interaction goes like this:
Bernard: Is there a Mr. Gump, Mrs. Gump?
Sally Field: He’s on vacation.
Bernard: [SEXUAL GRUNTING THAT WILL HAUNT LINDY WEST TO THE GRAVE]
Later, Forrest is like, “Mom, what’s ‘vacation’ mean? Where Daddy went?” and Sally Field goes, “Vacation’s where you go somewhere and you don’t ever come back.”
Again. Um. Respectfully, maybe the issue here isn’t that Forrest is a bumbling simpleton, it’s that his mom keeps telling him that life is chocolate and vacation means that you never come back??? Maybe he’s just an average dude who’s spent his whole life being lied to by freaks about the definitions of basic words.
On the first day of school, Gump meets his school bus driver:
Gump: Mama said not to be taking rides from strangers.
Bus Driver: This is the bus to school.
Gump: I’m Forrest, Forrest Gump.
Bus Driver: I’m Dorothy Harris.
Gump: Well, now we ain’t strangers anymore. [gets on bus]
I think I see a couple of holes in your security system there, Mrs. Gump, but okeydokey.
Once aboard the school bus, Gump becomes acquainted with a great Southern tradition: white people being territorial about bus seats. “This seeeyit’s taayyykuuhn.” “Cayn’t sit heeeeyuuuhhhhh.” But like a
