Forrest Gump in its list of the "Best 100 Conservative Movies" of all time. Then, in 2009, the magazine ranked the film number four on its 25 Best Conservative Movies of the Last 25 Years list. "Tom Hanks plays the title character, an amiable dunce who is far too smart to embrace the lethal values of the 1960s. The love of his life, wonderfully played by Robin Wright Penn, chooses a different path; she becomes a drug-addled hippie, with disastrous results." James Burton, a communication arts professor at Salisbury University, argued that conservatives claimed "Forrest Gump" as their own due less to
Forrest Gump (character) had never seen anything so beautiful in my life," he would later say of her, "she was like an angel." The two became close friends, often playing around a large nearby tree. Forrest described their relationship saying, "Jenny and me was like peas and carrots." Jenny was one of the few people besides his mother to accept Forrest as he was, helping him learn to read and stand up to bullies who harassed him. However, Jenny's home life was not nearly as happy as Forrest's: her mother had died when she was five and her father was an abusive alcoholic