The digitally savvy director’s fixed-perspective experiment takes us back to the future with mixed results.
Robert Zemeckis’ golden touch has faded since the prior century when his hit streak stretched from 1984′s Romancing the Stone through 2000′s Cast Away.
Along the way, he won an Oscar for directing Forrest Gump (1994), the best picture winner that became one of the weirdest blockbusters in history and enshrined him as our national boomer laureate either in spite or because of its indecipherable politics.
But his more recent, less-beloved pictures have continued to combine digital experimentation with strong organising ideas. Both elements are front and centre in Here, an ambitious drama tracing the events that occur in a single room - and, before that, the land on which the room will be built - over eons.
He’s borrowed the premise from the eponymous 2014 graphic novel by Richard McGuire. Otherwise, the project is a Gump reunion of screenwriter Eric Roth, cinematographer Don Burgess, composer Alan Silvestri, and, most crucially, stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright.
Tom Hanks and Robin Wright in Here (2024).
The story unfolds out of sequence, beginning millions of years before and continuing at least a few more after the seven-decade span in which two generations of the Young family occupy this house, somewhere in one of the 13 former British colonies in the New World. (There’s a flashback to a Continental Army messenger announcing the British surrender in 1783, to which a soldier replies, “Now what?”)
But it’s the prosaic, sad saga of Richard and Margaret Young - Hanks and Wright - that occupies most of the film’s surprisingly pithy 104 minutes, from an unplanned pregnancy in their teen years on through all the joys and trials of parenthood, eldercare and the indignities of their own superannuation.
Broadening the time frame of any story can be a counterintuitive shortcut to profundity. The gimmick here is the way Zemeckis denies himself most of the superpowers that film editing affords a storyteller.
In Here, he anchors his camera in one spot and lets events play out in front of it. The surface of the Earth cools, the dinosaurs get obliterated, an indigenous couple makes love. Then, in 1945, World War II veteran Al Young (Paul Bettany), having learned that his wife, Rose (Kelly Reilly), is expecting, stretches their budget to buy a house for $3400. By this point, we’ve already overheard a real estate agent standing in the same room eight decades later chirp, “$1 million is a steal these days!”
Tom Hanks in Cast Away.
This kind of fixed-perspective, multigenerational chronicle is more oft-attempted in theatre than in movies. Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, with its veneration of American ordinariness, is the obvious lodestar, but living playwrights like Bruce Norris (Clybourne Park) and Ella Hickson (Oil) have told stories of this ilk, too.
Ironically, it’s Zemeckis’ reluctance to embrace theatrical artifice over attempted photorealism that prevents Here from hitting as powerfully as it might. He uses traditional prosthetic makeup along with an artificial intelligence thingy called Metaphysic Live to try to sell the illusion of Hanks and Wright - 68 and 58, respectively - as teenagers, octogenarians and so on.
Bettany and Reilly, 53 and 47, age up and down, too. Twenty years after Zemeckis creeped us all out with his dead-eyed Hanks avatar in The Polar Express, his army of mouse-clickers still haven’t bridged the uncanny valley that makes us recoil from the sight of digitally futzed-with human faces. The eerily frictionless illusions Zemeckis’ VFX team dials up just make it harder for us to suspend our disbelief.
Worse, he underlines these shortcomings by periodically filling the frame with meaningless CGI filigree, cutesy animated squirrels and hummingbirds that would seem more at home in Kung Fu Panda 5 than in a tear-jerker for grown-ups.
The original Kung Fu Panda.
(Because truth is forever stranger than fiction, a little-seen 2013 science fiction film called The Congress starred Wright as a version of herself who sells her digital likeness to an entertainment conglomerate in perpetuity and retires from “live” acting.)
Here’s other big flaw is a weak batch of scenes involving two cartoonish couples who occupy the house circa 1900-1945, including an aviation enthusiast who declares to his spouse, “The future is the only direction we’re headed!” (This triggers another detour into the past, naturally.)
Tom Hanks and Robin Wright in Here (2024).
A section involving a black family that moves in during the 2010s is just as thinly imagined, if more justifiable. Zemeckis shows us these parents gravely advising their teenage son how to survive being pulled over by a cop. He doesn’t give these characters the time or nuance he affords to Hanks and Wright, but their presence at least acknowledges he understands the era of boomer hegemony will end. Eventually.
