Comparative Adaptation: Forrest Gump (Book and Film)

Hee Ku Kang

It is common for the film adaptation of a book to fail to improve or add upon what the book already has. In the case of Winston Groom’s famous novel Forrest Gump (1986), however, the film is not only different from the book but also actually better in many ways. Hollywood star Tom Hanks’ impressive acting certainly contributes, but it is mainly the scriptwriter Eric Roth’s, and possibly the director’s, intention that shaped the film so differently. Here is how and why:

The main character, Forrest Gump, is portrayed completely differently in the two works. In the film, Forrest is an independent being who is capable of sustaining himself. Actually, aside from his problem with speech and slight tactlessness, he is quite a normal man. He is able to bring up little Forrest all by himself after Jenny passes away, and his athletic abilities (running in particular) and mental sturdiness are impressively above average, if not the best. His being special this way helps him pave a right path in his life, resulting in his successes as a Vietnam War hero, a college foot ball player, and, of course, member of the national ping pong team. In the book, however, Forrest is never this successful. He has to attend a special school for mentally retarded kids after being banished out of a public school. In the film, his mom manages to keep him in a public school by having sex with the school principal, but that never happens in the book. Like others of his “kind,” Forrest is segregated from what normal kids are offered and has to be treated differently from early stages of his life. Moreover, unlike in the film, Forrest is unable to finish university. He does play football but never gets that famous, and he never plays ping pong. In short, the book Forrest is much less successful as a person than the film Forrest. It is then obvious that he is less individualistic and independent as well.

In Jenny’s case, her character is similar between the book and the film, but her background differs a lot. In the book, Jenny is a regular, normal girl who doesn’t really have a lot of problems in her life. In the film, however, she has a lot more problems than normal girls of her age would. Her father is a perverted jerk, and her mother is dead. This adds up to her coming to have several problems with drug and sex in her adult life. We can clearly see that the scriptwriter intended to portray Jenny more negatively to make the altered ending - her dying and Forrest coming to look after his son, not the original ending where Jenny goes away with another man and raises little Forrest herself - more positive and plausible. And I have to say it certainly worked.

All in all, Forrest Gump is one of those rare cases where the film is actually better than the original work. I personally think that this effectively brings down the common misconception that most people have about films that are recreations of stories from books. Well, it seems now that Harry Potter was one of the worst cases.