‘Here’ Review: Tom Hanks and Robin Wright Get Boxed in by Banal Story in Robert Zemeckis’ Fixed-Camera Experiment
There’s something quintessentially American and straight out of Norman Rockwell about centering a survey of multiple generations around the living room, with idealized themes of home and family reinforced by scenes around the Christmas tree or the dining table, fully extended to accommodate the ever-expanding clan at Thanksgiving. But relatable doesn’t always mean interesting, even if the moments of joy don’t hide the vein of sadness and disappointment that runs through Here.
The same goes for the idea of shooting everything — reaching back to prehistory and right on up through contemporary times — from the same fixed point and using the same wide angle. In terms of technical craft, it’s a daring experiment, but one perhaps less geared to a dynamic narrative than an art installation. Narrowing the frame constricts the storytelling, no matter how many times a Significant Life Moment is shoved up close to the lens for emphasis.
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Reuniting with his Forrest Gump screenwriter Eric Roth and stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, director Robert Zemeckis takes his visual cues from the source material, Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic novel of the same name, expanded from a six-page comic strip published in the late ‘80s.
The interdisciplinary artist pushed the boundaries of the comic format by sticking to the exact same location in every panel. Framed through the living room of a house constructed in 1902, his story spans millennia but is focused predominantly on the 20th and 21st centuries. Most of those panels include one or more smaller panes that show the same space at different, non-chronological points in time.
By replicating the graphic novel’s approach three-dimensionally, Zemeckis’ film becomes like a living diorama with insets providing windows into the past and future. Purely from a craft standpoint, it’s mesmerizing, even beautiful, for a while. Until it’s not.
Zemeckis for years now has been fixated on technology and its visual capabilities, to the point where he neglects the rudiments of story and character development. The vignettes here return frequently to the same families at different moments in their lives, but rarely settle in for long enough to sustain narrative momentum or give the characters much depth.
In addition to the self-imposed rigidity of the visual scheme, Here will draw attention — probably in divisive ways — to another technological element that’s even more of a distraction. The director uses a generative AI tool from VFX studio Metaphysic to de-age Hanks and Wright as Richard and Margaret, the characters whose arc, traced from high school through old age, dominates the film. Using archival images of the actors, the program spits out digital makeup that can be face-swapped onto the cast as they perform.
It’s more advanced and convincing than the de-aging in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman five years ago, allowing for greater elasticity and facial expressivity — even if the physicality of the actors’ bodies isn’t always a perfect match, notably with Hanks in the teenage years. But there’s also something inherently creepy about the process, particularly at a time when many of us are apprehensive about screen acting going down an ever more dehumanizing digital road.
The movie begins with the house under construction. This introduces the concept of panes depicting various elements as they come together, with furnishings from different periods and the first glimpses of people representing various threads that will be elaborated on throughout, some more substantially than others. The opening scenes also plant the central idea in Roth and Zemeckis’ screenplay of houses as receptacles for memory, both lived experience and history.
The frame then jumps way back in time to when the area was a primordial swamp, crawling with dinosaurs — until that landscape is razed in a fiery mass-extinction event, yielding an ice age and then gradually regenerating into a verdant clearing bursting with flora and (CG) fauna. A pair of young Indigenous Americans (Joel Oulette and Dannie McCallum) share a kiss there, before another time leap reveals enslaved people building a colonial mansion.
We get fragments of life in the house over different periods: Pauline (Michelle Dockery) is an anxious wife and mother in the very early 20th century, fearful that the obsession of her husband John (Gwilym Lee) with aviation will end in tragedy. Leo (David Fynn) and Stella (Ophelia Lovibond) occupy the house for two decades starting in the mid-1920s. Unencumbered by children, they are a pair of fun, frisky quasi-bohemians who get lucky with Leo’s invention of the recliner. More of their levity would have been welcome in a film often weighed down by its earnestness.
The least developed strand covers a Black family, parents Devon (Nicholas Pinnock) and Helen Harris (Nikki Amuka-Bird) and their teenage son Justin (Cache Vanderpuye), who purchase the house in 2015, when the asking price of $1 million is considered “a steal.”
Their presence serves to show how neighborhoods evolve and become more inclusive. But there’s a nagging feeling that the Harris family’s function is largely representational, especially when their most fleshed out scene shows Devon and Helen sitting Justin down for a serious talk about the rules he must observe to stay safe if he’s pulled over by a cop while driving. Their scenes also touch on the frightening first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic through the fate of their longtime Latina housekeeper (Anya Marco-Harris).
But the bulk of the story centers on Richard’s family, starting with his parents, Al (Paul Bettany) and Rose (Kelly Reilly), who buy the house in 1945. Al is fresh out of the Army and suffering from what appears to be undiagnosed PTSD, which causes him to drink. A child of the Depression, he dwells on money worries, concerned that his salesman job won’t cover the bills.
The first-born of their four children, Richard (played by younger actors until Hanks steps in), brings home his high school sweetheart, Margaret, to meet the family. When she reveals her intention to go first to college and then law school, Al asks, “What’s wrong with being a housewife?” He’s even more blunt when Richard, a keen painter, reveals that he wants a career as a graphic artist: “Don’t be an idiot. Get a job where you wear a suit.”
Richard and Margaret marry at 18, after she becomes pregnant. In a heavy-handed nod to sons dolefully following their fathers’ paths, Richard packs up his paints and canvases. He takes a job selling insurance to support his family, though they continue to live with his parents. Margaret never gets comfortable in a house that doesn’t feel like hers, creating festering problems in the marriage. But Richard has also inherited his dad’s financial fears, which prevents them from taking a risk on a place of their own.
I wish I could say I got emotionally invested in the changes this family goes through, but everything feels lifted from the most routine playbook of aging, declining health, birth, death, divorce and, most insistently, deferred dreams, sometimes to be taken up by the next generation. At Margaret’s surprise 50th birthday party, Wright gets stuck with a melancholy speech about all the things she had hoped to achieve by that age. It feels like a pale shadow of Patricia Arquette’s analogous — and far more economically articulated — scene in Boyhood.
Of the many moments in which characters step right up to the camera to say Something Important, the most embarrassing might be Richard on foreshadowing duty, noting “a moment we’ll always remember” while Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Our House” plays on the soundtrack. This feels straight out of a Saturday Night Live sketch.
It’s possible that people with an enduring fondness for Forrest Gump will be sufficiently captivated by seeing Hanks and Wright back together, making their characters’ outcomes affecting. But others are likely to remain stubbornly dry-eyed, despite Alan Silvestri’s syrupy score troweling on the sentiment.
For a movie covering such an expansive passage of American life, Here feels curiously weightless. It’s no fault of the actors, all of whom deliver solid work with characters that are scarcely more than outlines. No one fully manages to get out from under the movie’s preoccupation with visual technology at the expense of heart.
Historical detours zip back to colonial times when English Loyalist William Franklin (Daniel Betts), conveniently parked in a horse-drawn cart, grumbles to his wife about the radical politics of his father Benjamin (Keith Bartlett), pushing for American independence. (The less said about the cut to Richard and his younger brother at a costume party as dueling Benjamin Franklins, the better.) There are brief scenes from the Revolutionary War. And there’s a sketchy account of the Indigenous couple’s pre-settlement life, raising their own family and suffering their own losses.
But it’s characteristic of an episodic screenplay that finds no opportunity to belabor its themes too trite, no clichéd line of dialogue too platitudinous, that even the Native American thread gets tied up in a neat bow. That happens when archeological society members stop by and ask to poke around the garden a bit, suspecting the house might be built on an important site. Lo and behold …
Only at the very end does DP Don Burgess’ camera move from its fixed point in the living room, venturing outside the house to take in the tidy suburbia that surrounds it. But a glaringly fake CG hummingbird is the final reminder that almost everything about Here is synthetic.
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