Video Reviews: 'Forrest Gump' and 'Medium Cool' (1995)

Still, Cool is almost as programmatic as Gump. Just as Forrest's wayward love Jenny (Robin Wright) is the movie's sacrificial lamb, atoning for the purported excesses of the baby-boom generation, Cool's protagonists end up as an offering to the arbitrariness of fate. Having gone through the movie insisting that as a cameraman, he's an observer rather than a participant, John ends up a victim of the same sort of disaster he used to shoot so dispassionately. It's one of the many obvious points that litter the film.

Ultimately, Cool emerges as an agonized search for truth, treating history as an anarchic organism that can eat people alive, while Gump offers a cozy selection of truisms and regards history as nothing more than a karmic board game. After Cool, Wexler would not direct another fiction feature for more than 15 years — good thing he had made himself indispensable as a cinematographer (of such films as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Matewan). After telling us that life is like a box of chocolates, the Gump bunch got its plaudits, its Oscars, its $325 million box office gross, and its bonus video windfall. Which, I'd imagine, is what Steve Tisch really thinks the movie is about. Forrest Gump: C+ Medium Cool: B-