Forrest Gump

Every wisdom tradition guards a figure who looks, from the outside, like an idiot.

Parsifal is the pure fool who alone can find the Grail, precisely because he is too simple to be cunning and asks the healing question no clever knight thought to ask. The Tarot's Fool is card zero, the figure stepping off the cliff with a white rose and a small dog, both the beginning of the journey and its end, the innocence you set out with and the innocence you earn back. The Russian tradition has the yurodivy, the holy idiot the tsar himself feared, because the one man exempt from courtly cunning was the one man who could speak the truth to power. The Sufis have the majzub, the God-intoxicated one whose reason has been burned clean away by nearness to the divine. Dostoevsky wrote a whole novel about this man and titled it, without irony, The Idiot.

Forrest is this figure set loose in American history. He has no strategy, no irony, no self-image to defend, no inner committee second-guessing what he does. Because there is no ego straining the world through its wants, whatever passes through him comes out clean. He teaches a young Elvis the hips that will scandalize a nation, he stumbles into the break-in that ends a presidency, he hands the age its smiley-face shirt and its bumper-sticker philosophy, and he never once realizes he did any of it. The force of the century moves through him the way light moves through clear glass.

This is why the cynical reading, that the film rewards a passive fool, misses the point of the fool. He is not passive. He acts constantly, more than anyone else on screen. What he lacks is the grasping that turns action into striving. The tradition calls this a station, not a defect. The fool is not the man who has fallen short of understanding. He is the man on the far side of it.

Then there is the run. Jenny leaves again in the dark, and Forrest, with nothing to hold and nothing to say, walks out the door and starts running, and does not stop for three years, two months, and fourteen days, across the country and back and across again.

He runs for no cause at all. Reporters chase him down demanding to know what he is running for, world peace, the homeless, women's rights, the environment, and he is running for none of it. Crowds gather and fall in behind him and turn him into a prophet, reading scripture into a man who is only moving because moving was the one thing grief left him able to do. He hands the age two of its favorite slogans by accident along the way and keeps going, understanding none of the meaning that everyone insists on pouring into him.

This is the pilgrim, the wandering dervish, the renunciate who walks until the walking is finished and not a step longer. And the end of it is the most Taoist moment in American film. He stops dead in the middle of a desert highway, the crowd behind him holding its breath for the revelation, and he says, 'I'm pretty tired. I think I'll go home now.' No teaching. No summit reached. The walk was the entire point, and when it was done he simply stopped, which is wu wei exactly, action that ends when it is exhausted and not one stride after.

Then he goes home. That is the secret the clever spend their lives failing to learn. Of everyone in the film, the fool is the only one who arrives. The last frame lifts the feather off the book beside his son and returns it to the sky, the boy already sharper than his father and bound to carry it some other way. The feather belongs to no one. It lands where the breeze and the destiny, both happening at the same time, decide to set it down.

You will not watch it as a feel-good movie again. It was always a parable about the one man empty enough to let grace land on him, and clear enough to go home when the running was done.