A `Gump,' `Pulp' Relationship -- Loved Or Hated, Films Have Much In Common

A funny thing happens to movies on their way to blockbuster status.

Whether or not they started out as critics' favorites or festival prize winners, they invariably turn into love-it-or-hate-it phenomena.

With Robert Zemeckis' "Forrest Gump," it started happening just a few weeks after the movie opened in early July. The movie had initially been embraced by most critics as a daring original, something quite different from the summer run of sequels and spin-offs. Almost everyone praised its reality-questioning visual effects.

Yet by summer's end it had inspired a New Yorker cartoon in which a snooty restaurant maitre d' asked a couple if they wanted to sit in the "pro-`Gump' section or anti-`Gump' section." By year's end, the tone had turned hostile in some quarters.

While pushing her new book, "For Keeps," retired New Yorker critic Pauline Kael acknowledged that she hated "Gump" for its silent-majority complacency. A few critics even appeared to blame the movie for the Republican victory in November.

Earlier this week, The New York Times' chief movie critic, Janet Maslin, placed "Gump" on her list of 1994's 10 worst films, objecting to a hero who was "self-congratulatory in his blissful ignorance, warmly embraced as the embodiment of absolutely nothing."

A kinder, gentler Gump

Some have called the movie a Rorschach test. As USA Today's Mike Clark put it: "Ask 10 people what this `people's movie' is actually saying, and wait for five different answers."

In a sense, the filmmakers brought this on themselves. Winston Groom's 1986 book, "Forrest Gump," portrays the title character as a pot-smoking, Vietnam War-protesting veteran who accidentally causes a riot by throwing away his Congressional Medal of Honor. In the movie, his anti-war statements are deliberately muffled while his wayward childhood sweetheart, Jenny, takes on the "sins" of the counterculture and dies for them.

When asked why Gump lost his rough edges in the transition from book to film, Zemeckis claimed he didn't want the film to get tied down by Vietnam-era politics. By losing his activism, by becoming all things to all people, "Gump" may have gained a larger audience, but it was also bound to offend.

Nevertheless, the movie seems well on its way to dominating this year's Academy Awards. The National Board of Review recently named Tom Hanks best actor and picked "Gump" as co-winner of its best picture award.

"Gump" shared the prize with Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction," a low-budget film that has turned into a blockbuster on a smaller scale. In the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's current Golden Globes contest, the two films are again nearly tied for first place.

The love-it-or-hate-it reaction to "Pulp Fiction" has taken a little longer to sink in. It won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in May, got another boost from the New York Film Festival in September, and became a hit with American critics and audiences in the fall.

Too gruesome for some

Then it started getting to casual moviegoers and editorial writers who were shocked by Tarantino's black-comedy approach to violence. In the words of one critic, it became an "Op-Ed leper."

"We were stunned to find that this movie was so depraved and gruesome," wrote one Seattle Times reader who felt that the film "glorifies violence, rape, drug use, and ethnic slurs."

A few weeks ago, syndicated columnist Donna Britt reported in these pages that she had a great weekend because she and her husband chose not to see "Pulp Fiction."

"My mind's decor is too valuable to be splattered and smeared with some Hollywood sicko's horrific images," she wrote. She further recommended that everyone stay home and not see "Natural Born Killers" and "Interview With the Vampire."

She failed to point out that there are many fine, non-violent films that flop because moviegoers who stay home from brutal pictures also stay home from the alternatives. One of them, "Quiz Show," recently took the New York Film Critics' prize for best picture of 1994. Quality "PC" movies are indeed out there, but they don't always get the same box-office support as stories about vampires and gangsters.

"Family values and excessive violence - on the streets and on the screen - may be dominating the national debate," Elaine Dutka and Robert W. Welkos reported recently in the Los Angeles Times. "But - as the popularity of `Natural Born Killers' and `Pulp Fiction' point out - politics and entertainment are two different realms."

Popularity breeds discontent

Disagreement over anything that reaches a mass audience is probably inevitable. So is distancing yourself from something popular that you may once have liked.

After Bruce Springsteen had his first mainstream success with "Born in the USA," some of his most loyal fans backed off. Critics who initially loved "The Godfather" and "E.T." and "Star Wars" chose not to honor them with year-end awards after they set box-office records.

Time is the great equalizer. "E.T." was recently named to the National Film Registry of works that are considered "culturally, historically or esthetically significant." Not on the list is "Gandhi," the PC epic that defeated it at the 1982 Oscars and the New York Film Critics' awards.

Video also helps to put controversy in perspective. Just six years ago, Martin Scorsese's "The Last Temptation of Christ" was picketed by fundamentalist groups and banned by most theater chains. Last week, Tower Video was promoting a $15 cassette of the film as a stocking stuffer, prominently placing it in both its Christmas video display and next to the CD of Peter Gabriel's soundtrack music.

Although they seem to speak to two different audiences, "Pulp Fiction" and "Forrest Gump" will soon be sharing video-shelf space as well. "Gump" is due on tape in late April, and "Pulp" will probably turn up around the same time.

They have other things in common. They're both about fate, the luck of the draw and being in the right place at the right time.

Gump doesn't triumph through ignorance but because he has a charmed life and a flexible nature. In "Pulp Fiction," Samuel L. Jackson's hitman escapes the ironic fate of his partner (John Travolta) because he believes in miracles.

The feather that floats through "Forrest Gump" invites us not to be complacent but to ponder why the "least likely to succeed" sometimes triumph. It happens.

The valued watch that determines much of the comedy-of-errors action in "Pulp Fiction" makes us wonder how much our lives are guided by coincidence and obsessive choices.

The two movies are united in their view of existence as dangerous, unpredictable, mysterious and sometimes blessed.