Thirty years after Forrest Gump, filmmaker Robert Zemeckis, screenwriter Eric Roth, and stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright reunite for Here, a bland, mawkish film that takes the “drawing room” part of “drawing room play” incredibly seriously.
Roth and Zemeckis collaborate on a script adapting Richard McGuire’s experimental graphic novel, Here, in which every frame depicts the same space over millennia. It is at first a dinosaur-friendly swamp, then a place where Indigenous people rest, then the site of a colonial home, then a neo-Colonial suburban home occupied by several generations of the same family, before a new family claims the space for the future. The film follows the same trajectory, though Zemeckis never finds a way to enliven the concept on film.
2024 has been a year of established filmmakers taking big swings, and Here certainly falls into that category. Zemeckis has pioneered both genres such as sci-fi comedy (Back to the Future) and visual effects (Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Death Becomes Her, Forrest Gump), but over the last two decades, something has calcified, and his explorations are no longer boundary pushing so much as nightmare inducing (Polar Express, Pinocchio). Here falls into the latter category, achieving an unpleasant balance between being dead boring and visually repulsive. Not since Cats has a film been so hard to look at, though for different reasons. In Here, the challenge is perspective, which is limited to one single angle overlooking what is mostly a suburban living room. There is a fireplace, there is a window, there is always a sofa.
The other problem is similar to Cats, though, in that Here’s computer effects are astoundingly ugly. De-aging technology is STILL not as good as directors want it to be, and the more we have to look at it, the less convincing it is and the worse it looks. Here is 104 minutes long, that is 102 minutes too much of Tom Hanks’ computer aged face. Hanks stars as Richard, who grows up in the house. Robin Wright stars as Margaret, his high school sweetheart turned wife. Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly play Richard’s parents. Michelle Dockery, Ophelia Lovibond, Nikki Amuka-Bird, and Gwilym Lee all stop by, too.
The cast is excellent, the technology does them no favors. At best it’s distracting, at worst, it hinders their performances, rendering expressions gummy and eyes hollow. It would have been better to simply cast seven actors to play Richard over seven decades, instead we get to see Tom Hanks recreated in every era from Bosom Buddies to now, with Richard’s teen years being a borderline disastrous excursion into the uncanny valley. At no point is Tom Hanks a convincing teenager. No matter what you do to his face, you cannot hide his sixty-something voice or movement.
Zemeckis’s work has always been concerned with time, so the appeal of Here is obvious to a filmmaker like him. Unfortunately, Zemeckis does not come up with an engaging way to translate McGuire’s single perspective idea from page to screen. Zemeckis honors Here’s roots as a graphic novel by using bordered “cells” to layer timelines, creating a visual palimpsest that he mostly uses to transition from one scene to the next, the most boring application of the technique. And while you can sit with one of McGuire’s illustrated frames as long as you want, contemplating time and its fleetingness but also its endlessness, film is a narrative built on forward momentum. There is no, well, time to sit with the images and contemplate meaning, instead characters endlessly bleat that “time flies”, hammering us over the head with the film’s central theme until it feels shallow and, again, boring. It’s amazing how a film about the relentlessness of time can feel so incredibly slow, but Here sure does.
There is also a cheapness about the way Here acknowledges non-white families who pass by the living room spot. Joel Oulette and Dannie McCallum appear briefly as an unnamed Native American couple; in another scene, Nicholas Pinnock appears as a Black man telling his son, played by Cache Vanderpuye, about how to act if he’s pulled over by cops. The Black family is also unnamed, and these scenes are brief interpolations on The Spot’s otherwise white history, which does take the time to paint Benjamin Franklin’s illegitimate son as an asshole. If this sounds familiar, yes, The Spot is kind of the Forrest Gump of American house history.
Here is a film about time, it’s also a film about the increasing inaccessibility of the American housing market. And it’s a film about how de-aging technology isn’t as effective as filmmakers insist it is, as well as an argument for casting multiple actors to play the same character across generations. It’s also proof of the need for more inventive filmmakers to take on high concept material like Here. (David Lowery uses a similar fixed perspective in A Ghost Story, but he matches it with a lyrical narrative style that better suits his concept than a surprisingly linear family drama.) Zemeckis has ambition, but at this stage, his sentimentality as a storyteller overwhelms everything else. Gone are his humor, his satirical edge, his acerbic eye on society. What’s left is a dull film about a place that is most interesting when dinosaurs live there. After the asteroid, it’s all downhill.
Here is now playing exclusively in theaters.
