Forrest Gump.

A feather wafts in the breeze at the start of Forrest Gump and comes to rest on the dirty sneaker of a man sitting on a bus stop bench. Forrest, a slightly retarded man in his late thirties, picks it up and places it in his favorite book, Curious George. Later, he will lose the feather without even noticing, but that's all right. Something else will blow Forrest's way. Always does. Life serves Forrest not because Forrest serves life but because Forrest is the darling of the gods, or at least certain particular gods named Eric Roth, scriptwriter, and Robert Zemeckis, director. (And there's probably a third called Winston Groom, who wrote the source novel, which I haven't read.)

The rest of this opening sequence is brilliant both in concept and execution and may well be the best thing in the movie. Forrest, looking and sounding like every strange person who has ever trapped us in a public place with inane, endless monologue, begins telling his life story to a quietly annoyed and unresponsive young woman. (She's later joined, then replaced, by other listeners.) The long shot in which this occurs makes the viewer feel as detached as the woman, but, as Forrest drones on, the camera slowly creeps forward and tightens on Forrest's face. He may seem like a dolt to you, the director seems to be telling us, but this is our hero--whether you like it or not--and the rest of this movie is going to certify my choice.

Does it? Has Forrest the stuff of heroes? Well, he exhibits goodheartedness, pluck, and, most of all, faithfulness--virtues that may be prized both in men and dogs. But virtue is not the most salient thing about Forrest. Miraculousness is. For miracles constantly happen to our hero or are performed by him. This film has been accused by some critics of saying that we should try to be as stupid as Forrest Gump if we want to be happy. I disagree. Neither intelligence nor lack of it could effect for anyone what happens to Forrest.

The miracles begin in childhood. Handicapped in body as well as mind, Forrest, his legs in braces, can't run from bullies. Urged on by his girlfriend, Jenny (she will become the love of his life), he runs away and--lo!--the braces fly off and little Forrest instantly turns into a champion sprinter. An American variant of magic realism? Maybe so, though there's a lot more magic here than realism. His talent lands him a football college scholarship and also saves his life in Vietnam where he outruns bullets and rescues half his platoon by speeding their wounded bodies to safety. Later, Forrest becomes a champion ping-pong player on a team that travels to a recently opened China, then a millionaire shrimper, then a fabled cross-country jogger with a cult following. He comes into brief contact with celebrities like Elvis Presley (he teaches the King how to hip swivel), JFK, John Lennon, and Nixon (Forrest innocently precipitates Watergate). His is a truly charmed life and, in fact, Forrest Gump might best be enjoyed as a sort of modern fairy tale with Forrest standing for the sort of Grimm hero who starts out despised but triumphs through pluck and the patronage of elves.

Trouble is, Forrest's story doesn't take place in a fairy tale world but in ours, and he lives through the events we lived through or witnessed on TV. No soldier was spared the bullets of the enemy because of the intervention of elves nor was anyone cut down because of some fatal lack of simplicity. Forrest Gump, at its best, is truly funny when we see our hero showing LBJ his wounded backside during a Medal of Honor ceremony or confessing to JFK that he has to take a leak. The computer wizardry that places Tom Hanks (playing Gump) into actual news footage is neat (though the dubbing is awful), and it's always fun to see the iconic figures of our time coaxed into buffoonery, as "Saturday Night Live" skits prove every weekend. But what's quite unfunny, perhaps even faintly obscene, is the use of the agonies of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War to demonstrate the boundless luck of Forrest Gump. It is, of course, the prerogative of all artists to turn the reality of Life Out Here into the special reality inside a novel, play, or film. But does Forrest Gump transform recent history or merely use it for kicks?

Even if we take Forrest Gump as a fairy tale, Forrest doesn't wear the mantle of fairy tale hero very adroitly. Such heroes may start with luck but win through pluck. But nearly everything that benefits Forrest is done for him. "What's my destiny?" he asks his mother, and she replies, "You're going to have to figure that out for yourself." In point of fact, Forrest doesn't have to figure anything out. Athletic skills, survival in Vietnam, fame and fortune: all are divinely bestowed or produced by the good offices of others. Even his beautiful but feckless Jenny seeks Forrest out--twice! He never has to show the autonomy that a dramatic hero must have to be truly interesting.

Or is Forrest Gump not a fairy tale but a black comedy? Is it in fact telling us that in an utterly unjust world, only the simple-minded can continually luck out? Is the sequence in which a hurricane wipes out scores of presumably honest shrimpers so that our hero alone can flourish supposed to demonstrate this grim idea? But does any audience member really experience this plot twist as the joke of some prankster deity? Of course not. The unfortunate shrimpers are kept out of sight and therefore out of mind. We are meant only to rejoice at one more victory of Forrest's. This is no black comedy.

Perhaps Gump is meant to be taken as a human blank, a la Chauncey Gardiner of Jerzy Kosinsky's Being There, whose very blankness evokes the self-deceptions of those around him. This is certainly the way Forrest is used in the scene in which happenstance and an aggressive Abbie Hoffman-type coerce our hero into addressing an antiwar rally about what Vietnam meant to him. The cord on his microphone is immediately pulled by a Pentagon guard and the crowd only sees his lips move. But, having been assured by the Abbie Hoffmanesque that our hero has made a great antiwar speech, the crowd cheers. So Forrest is all things to all political persuasions, right? But, wait a minute. Forrest isn't a blank slate like Chauncey but a man with a very specific upbringing and very straightforward beliefs instilled in him by his mother. And, as staged, we can see that though the crowd couldn't hear Forrest, the rally leader certainly could. What does he hear that makes him mistake Gump's speech for protest (assuming there is a mistake)? In Being There we heard the simplicities of Chauncey Gardiner (Peter Sellers) and understood exactly how his literal statements about gardening could be taken as profound political metaphors by phony politicians and talk-show hosts. The satire of Being There was predicated on these mistakes. Zemeckis probably thought he was making his point economically by simply rendering his hero mute but, when he pulls the plug on Forrest, he also pulls the plug on any chance for real, specific satire.

So, if Forrest is neither a satisfactory fairy tale hero nor a figure of satire, what is he doing at the center of this fantastic yarn of the sixties and early seventies? I believe the answer to that lies in a little moment that occurs fairly early in the movie. When Forrest mentions the attempted assassination of George Wallace, one of his auditors at the bus stop replies that she remembers it and seems about to pursue the topic. Abruptly, Forrest shifts the subject to his love for Jenny. As far as he's concerned, George Wallace doesn't exist except as a dimly remembered "angry little man." And JFK was just a "young man," Elvis "a nice young man" with a guitar, John Lennon a "young man" on the Dick Cavett show, and Abbie Hoffman a person who used the F word a lot. Nixon is a person who got Forrest a nice hotel room (in the Watergate!). And so on. For the public world of politics, power, and celebrity doesn't exist for Forrest. His only objects in life are to make his mama proud of him and to be true to his eternal love, Jenny.

And that is why Forrest is the hero of this story. Not because he is mentally limited but because he is a completely ahistorical, apolitical, celebrity-blind man living through an epoch that is overwhelmingly political, historically self-conscious, and choked by celebrity worship. When he takes up ping-pong, his instructor informs him that the game isn't hard and that "all you have to do is keep your eye on the ball." Forrest's one spectacular talent is that he sees only what is in front of him and goes for it. He survives and triumphs in his epoch while being absolutely blind to its ethos, its heroes, or its significance.

And that is why Zemeckis and his collaborators shield their hero from bullets and from failure. By making this particular character the protagonist of a saga set in the sixties and seventies, and by presenting his life as a supreme success story, they show a lot of savvy, and very cynical savvy at that. After a quarter century of too many senate hearings, too many journalistic exposes, and too many sex scandals, the public has had enough of all the big guys who want our votes, our consent and, incredibly, our love. This isn't just a time of antiheroism, that intellectual mainstay of the past half-century. No, we may be moving beyond that into a period of anti-prominence. If so, Forrest Gump will be both its harbinger and its standardbearer.