You know those extended commercials that sometimes run around the holidays that offer up vague, sentimentalized bromides about love, family, and brotherhood that are brought to you by soulless corporations as part of their annual year-end "We're good, right?" campaigns? Imagine one of those stretched out to 104 minutes, and you have Robert Zemeckis' "Here," a hollow and vapid paean to the whole of the human experience that has all the depth and profundity of a generic greeting card. The result is a movie that isn't just bad but baffling—one that traffics in practically every imaginable emotion without generating a genuine one of its own.
The conceit of the film, based on the 2014 graphic novel by Richard McGuire, is to plunk the camera down in one place to illustrate all of the events that have occurred in that very spot throughout history, using frames-within-the-frame to transition from one point in time to the next. At first, it is open land that gives us glimpses of everything from the dinosaurs perishing to Native Americans living their lives to the home of Benjamin Franklin's estranged son. As the 20th century arrives, the location becomes a duplex's living room, and we begin observing the lives of some of those living within its walls. In the 1910s, we witness how Pauline Harter (Michelle Dockery) is constantly fretting over the possibility that her risk-taking husband John (Gwilym Lee) will perish in the newfangled airplane that appears to be the only focus in his life. In the 1940s, on the other hand, we observe a horny-but-happy couple (David Flynn and Ophelia Lovibond) as they go about developing one of the great creations of the century.
For about 60 years and most of the film's duration (which begins to feel roughly equal after a while), the Young family owns the home. It was purchased shortly after the end of World War II by returning soldier Al Young (Paul Bettany) and his wife Rose (Kelly Reilly), who proceeded to raise three children there. One of them grows up to be Richard (Tom Hanks), a young man with dreams of being an artist that falls by the wayside when he knocks up his high school sweetheart Margaret (Robin Wright)—they get married, and Richard takes a job selling insurance to provide for his family. Because finances are tight, they are forced to move in with Richard's parents, and although there is always talk of getting their own place, Richard never seems willing to pull that trigger. As the years go by, we watch the Youngs as they observe both landmark events in the whole of history to the kind of everyday things that we all experience—birth, death, love, depression, infidelity, marital dissatisfaction, dealing with aging parents and the like—all from this one fixed position.
With "Here," Robert Zemeckis is clearly trying to evoke memories of "Forrest Gump" by reuniting the key members of that film's creative team—the package also includes screenwriter Eric Roth, composer Alan Silvestri, and cinematographer Don Burgess—in the hopes of getting lightning to strike twice. What he doesn't have, however, are two things that made that film work—a compelling narrative and a darkly humorous undertone that helped prevent it from being overwhelmed by sentimentality. Except for the couple from the 1940s, who have a weirdo energy that supplies the film's only real spark of life, none of the inhabitants of the house or their experiences are particularly interesting. When the proceedings do threaten to develop some kind of interest or tension, they are more often than not undercut by clumsy transitions to another era to imply how we are all connected in some way—in perhaps the most awkward of them, a leaky roof segues into Margaret's water breaking. Speaking of clumsy, the vignettes involving the aforementioned Native Americans and the Black family that inhabits the house after the Youngs are especially jarring—while their presence initially suggests that the film might touch on more troubling aspects of the human experience, they ultimately seem to be there only to ensure that it isn't 100% lily-white.
As for the formal concept and visual conceit that appear to have been Zemeckis's key points of interest, neither comes off particularly well. While the notion of seeing the whole of history from one specific perspective could yield potentially interesting results in the pages of a graphic novel, where the images are static to begin with, it does not translate well into cinematic terms—important scenes are presented in awkwardly-staged shots, and after a while, you have to wonder exactly how many births, deaths, sexual encounters and dramatic epiphanies are going to occur in the exact same location where the Youngs put out the extended table for Thanksgiving dinner. Even more disastrous is the computerized de-aging process deployed to make the various actors look younger (and eventually older) than they already are. This process was criticized when Martin Scorsese used it in "The Irishman," but at least it was used sparingly there. Here, it is in constant use, and it never really works—the actors too often have a plasticine look to them that is both distracting (Wright especially suffers as a result of this) and undercuts whatever emotions the characters are trying to suggest.
"Here" is a work so cloying and ham-fisted in its attempts to move you that there is a point when you find yourself thinking that the only thing that Zemeckis hasn't thrown into the mix is a needle drop of "Our House" and then he proceeds to do just that. He can still be a compelling filmmaker when he wants to be (check out the great "Allied"). Still, he is working here with a project that seems designed to allow him to indulge in his worst habits, and he drags fine actors like Hanks and Wright (for whom roughly half her dialogue seems to be some kind of variation about how time flies) down along with him. Spoiler Alert! There is, in fact, one key moment in the film where the camera is moved—this proves to be more than can be said for those of us in the audience.
This review was filed from the premiere at the Chicago International Film Festival. It opens on November 1st.
