In Hollywood, most movies tell stories. But not “here”.
Adapted from Richard McGuire’s conceptual graphic novel in which the perspective is the same on every page – the living room of a century-old American home – while rectangular panels within each frame reveal events from different years, if not entirely separate eras, ‘here’. It revolves around an idea.
Have you ever sat somewhere – perhaps a hotel room, a park bench, or a remote location – and wondered what happened there before? How many people have been accepted into this place exactly? Or fought, or fell in love? What does this say about the human experience, where people can be connected through shared actions, and places can hold memories and secrets?
There are deep thoughts to be found in such holes, and the film version of Here points almost in the right direction, only to be distracted by a handful of shallow threads — specifically, the disappointingly generic lives of four families inhabiting the same space at different times. In a new interview with “Forrest Gump” screenwriter Eric Roth and the film’s stars, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, director Robert Zemeckis clumsily replicates the conceit of a steady camera in what plays out as an elaborate visual effects experiment.
For Zemeckis, the question is not how many existential truths he can cram into (or out of) a traditional New England living room, but whether he can get away with manipulating the ages of his screen actors across more than half a century. Technically, this is now possible, although the results appear unnatural, adding another turn-off to the already confusing set of events.
From Who Framed Roger Rabbit to The Polar Express, Zemeckis’ superpower has always been his pioneering spirit, while his kryptonite leans into unearned sentimentality. “Here” fits this pattern perfectly, as Zemeckis devotes his energy not to crafting fully dimensional characters, but to developing the kind of “digital makeup” that Martin Scorsese used on the young and then cast of “The Irishman,” effectively sapping the “Irishman” project. The very thing he set out to celebrate: life.
“Here” begins with fleeting images of the house where it all happens, glimpsed through a series of neatly framed rectangles, before taking us back more than 65 million years to the moment when dinosaurs designated this empty space as a place Fit to lay eggs. Then comes an asteroid (or perhaps a volcanic eruption), followed by an ice age that swells and melts within seconds.
It’s hard not to remember “The Tree of Life” at this moment: there, Terrence Malick reflects on how a life that feels so important to those who live it can seem so insignificant in the context of creationism, dinosaurs, and the immensity of time. McGuire attempted something relatively radical with his book, expanding the comic book form in the process: instead of telling a sequential story, he combined different time periods into a single scene, allowing complete strangers to echo each other’s thoughts and actions within a shared space.
Most viewers of “Here” will not have been exposed to McGuire’s graphic novel, and even those who have been will find Zemeckis and Roth employing a different strategy. In the film, it’s less about searching for unexpected connections and more about engineering clever transformations, as they try to align multiple generational arcs. Their goal is simple: to aid logical understanding of a variety of complexly non-linear scenes. However, the strategy of interlaced frames tends to blur the lines between the various families involved, trapping us in CG snow, as virtual seasons change and time passes through the large window. While our outside view is limited to the colonial mansion across the street, many of the characters’ dreams lie beyond these walls.
John and Pauline Harter (played by Gwilym Lee and Michelle Dockery) are the first couple to occupy the house, which appears to have been built in 1907. Pauline is constantly worried about her tossing-and-so husband, a daredevil pilot whom she fears. It will crash someday. Without revealing the fate of this family that arose in the early twentieth century, we should say that anxiety serves no purpose in “here.” In fact, it can be punished in sarcastic ways, as if to show that obsession with the future is the surest way to miss the present.
This attitude extends to Hanks’ anxious character, Richard, who has given up his painting career in order to support his family. Little Richie wasn’t even born yet when his father, Al (Paul Bettany), and his three-months-pregnant mother, Rose (Kelly Reilly), agreed to buy the two-story house for $3,400 in 1945. It wouldn’t change hands again for another 60 years, making This family and their three children are the people we see most, while the African Americans who buy it from them and the indigenous tribe who have long lived there feel largely symbolic—the dramatic equivalent of recognizing indigenous land.
When Hanks first appears, digitally de-aged to look like he did in his “Bosom Buddies” days, it gives some focus to what can seem like an endless PowerPoint presentation. When he introduces his girlfriend Margaret (Wright) a few scenes later, their movie star status is proof that we should pay attention — and not to the horrific-looking facial replacement technology, which looks more like HD Sims than actors. “Younger selves, but for these two personalities.
As with Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, offering a longitudinal look at several milestones in the American family invites us to consider the universality of those experiences. However, “Here” lacks the kind of specificity that might elevate such scenes beyond mere cliché, putting the onus on composer Alan Silvestri (another “Forrest Gump” vet) to provide the emotion. While it is true that a great deal of life takes place in living rooms, Roth hijacks events that should happen elsewhere in order to enact a birth, a death, a wedding, and three sex scenes in the same place where Christmas and Thanksgiving are celebrated.
Zemeckis gives the whole thing a somewhat hackneyed, Currier- and Ives-like feel (especially in the many colonial-era vignettes, when Ben Franklin appears), as if vying with vintage Saturday Evening Post covers for a portrait of a typical American family. But the spot he chose to place his still camera — at a slight angle, the sofa facing the screen — suggests a more pervasive visual reference: that of the classic sitcom.
Blocking constantly reinforces this model, and because Zemeckis doesn’t cut or take close-ups, he forces his actors to get closer to the lens anytime he wants us to see their faces. Ninety-four minutes later, the director finally chooses to unhook his camera, panning around to observe an important moment between two characters. Had Zemeckis constructed “Here” as a museum installation rather than a film, a fixed point of view might have made sense. But we’re there to be moved, and for that to work, the camera has to work, too.