A truly awful film, which I have never been able to sit through from beginning to end.

However, the original novel by Winston Groom is one of the greatest books of the 90s. Where the film is cloying and sentimental, the novel is bitter and scathing. The difference is apparent in the first line:

The movie
"My mama always told me, life is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're gonna get."

The novel
"Let me tell you something - being an idiot is no box of chocolates."

...and it pretty much carries on from there. Everything is wrong in the novel - Forrest's mama is a bitter, isolationist matriarch, Sally becomes a wasted junkie slut and Forrest himself is confused and angry. This is the main difference between the film and the novel - the film had a rather sinister message of "if you keep your head down, be polite, love your mama and don't question your betters, you'll be just fine". The novel has a darker purpose, to show that the American public (especially around the Vietnam era) were blinded, lied to and had their ability to comprehend their environment reduced to the level of a man with an IQ of 70. And even Forrest, stupid as he is, sees things that seem invisible to the smarter people around him.

There is also some magnificent surrealism in the novel - Nixon bringing Forrest into his private chamber and attempting to sell him stolen watches is hilarious, plus the long sequence in the middle of the novel where Forrest is forced to go on a space launch, which crash-lands on an island of cannibals. For some reason, the film never touched those areas.