Never mind that, as David Thomson pointed out in these pages last month, a man of Forrest's IQ would be barely able to tie his shoe-laces. Forrest thrives.He has a talent for running (an emblematic virtue in a country that was founded on flight) and gets to college as a star American footballer. He goes to Vietnam and, as devoted and courageous as a hound, covers himself in glory. In peacetime he finds fame and fortune as a ping-pong player, before setting up a shrimp-fishing business (keeping a promise to a dead Nam colleague), in which an ill wind blows him the good fortune of destroying all the other boats but his.

On and on it goes, through meetings with presidents (Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon), in which Hanks is grafted into archive footage, and with stars who Forrest unwittingly inspires - Elvis with the idea of his shuffle, John Lennon with the lyrics to 'Imagine' Entirely episodic, the film is a non-starter as drama. Robert (Back to the Future) Zemeckis is the most technically ingenious film-maker in the world, but here his innovation serves a structure that is ancient. It's Forward to the Past.What does it all mean? The joke of the film's success has been in watching its inanity analysed with Talmudic intensity. It is a conservative film, the right claim, because Forrest loves his mum, fights a good Vietnam war, and prospers, while Jenny (Robin Wright), his childhood sweetheart, opts for the counter-culture and comes to grief. It is a liberal film, theleft ripostes, because Forrest's war success is an indictment of the military's mindlessness. All this is about as instructive as gauging a child's politics from how he plays with his soldiers, since Forrest Gump isn't an adult work at all. As for ideas, it dabbles in a piece of pacifism here, a few family values there, and ends on a note of pantheistic bombast.

If there is a general idea it is that we should be as cowed, stupid but good-natured as Forrest, and muddle through. Sub-humanity is the solution for humanity.It would be churlish not to acknowledge Tom Hanks's skill and charm as the moronic Gump. The character follows a recent tradition of sentimentalising mental handicap, and Hanks wrings at least as much sympathy from us as Leonardo di Caprio did in What's Eating Gilbert Grape and Johnny Depp in Benny and Joon. Hanks does a lot through stillness, acting wonderfully with his eyes, which seem to dart around in terror at the world's complication before settling on simplicity.

In moments of high emotion his eyeballs dilate and his voice becomes a croak, turning him into a sort of Forrest Gulp. There are also good performances from Robin Wright, as the intriguing, underused Jenny (A Portrait of Jenny might have been preferable to Forrest Gump) and Gary Sinise, as For rest's Vietnam lieutenant who has his legs shot off - a portrayal of the anguish of disability that puts the rest of the film to shame.Robert Zemeckis's direction is smart and witty, but it's a disappointment to see such mush coming from a true talent, whose superb Used Cars (1980), in its untrusting cynicism, was diametrically opposed to Forrest Gump. That speaks of a certain whoreishness, anda tendency to be seduced by cinematic toys. Zemeckis handles neatly the moments when Forrest is inserted into history (telling Kennedy in the Oval Office that he needs to pee, etc). But you can't help recalling Woody Allen's use of a similar device in Zelig toprovide a provocative metaphor for Jewish assimilation and a mocking commentary on the century's history. Forrest Gump is merely playing party games, and its moral, that it is to the numbskulled that we must look for our salvation, is far less helpful than Allen's message that insignificance doesn't have to be significant.'And that is all I have to say about that subject' - as For rest is wont to close his ruminations, as if halting the world's turmoil were as simple as a full stop - except to conclude that Forrest Gump is a tale told by an idiot, full of saccharin and sentimentality, signifying a new low in American film-making.