“Here” is an aeon-spanning experimental collage by Robert Zemeckis that plants the camera in one spot for give-or-take three billion years. The lens is static; the span, epic. An acre of New Jersey braves meteors, an ice age and dinosaurs. Sometime between the Pleistocene and Columbus, a deer tiptoes past. Alan Silvestri’s score swells triumphantly. Evolution!
Mostly, however, we’re staring at two houses. The first was erected before the American Revolution and belongs to William Franklin (Daniel Betts), a British loyalist who calls his kite-flying father Benjamin Franklin (Keith Bartlett) a terrorist. Secure in its place in history, the colonial mansion lords its importance over the second house, the lesser house, that you’d never drive out of your way to visit. But these humble digs are the star. Around 1900, the home’s walls get built around the camera, and in turn, the film builds itself around the mundane goings-on inside. Hovering midway between the sofa and the kitchen, we witness a century-plus of holidays, lazy days, kisses, arguments. Nothing worth a commemorative plaque. It’s a tribute to banality.
Richard McGuire’s groundbreaking graphic novel of the same name and conceit used comic panels as a special effect, overlapping anonymous figures into a blurry rumination on time. One page illustrates the chronic popularity of Twister. Another captures the progression of swears: “Nincompoop.” “Dweeb.” “Dirt bag.”
Zemeckis can be more interested in pixels than people. But this time, he wants recognizable people, too — heck, he wants movie stars — so he and Eric Roth tighten the screenplay’s focus to one family across six decades. There are glimpses of other characters: two Indigenous lovers (Joel Oulette and Dannie McCallum), a snippy suffragist (Michelle Dockery), a jazzy inventor and his wife (David Fynn and Ophelia Lovibond), and a modern family (Nicholas Pinnock and Nikki Amuka-Bird) who exist so close to our era that they come across bland.
The design team does a fantastic job delineating the years. Yet, the film treats everyone else like parentheses around the baby boomers Richard and Margaret (played by a de-aged Tom Hanks and Robin Wright), who fall in love as teenagers. Infatuated and naïve, Margaret coos, “I could spend the rest of my life here.” Cut to the young couple pregnant and married (in that order) and inheriting both the furniture and the mistakes of the groom’s parents (Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly).
This is being flogged as a “Forrest Gump” reunion with Zemeckis, Roth, Hanks and Wright teaming up for another film that slavers over the ’60s and ’70s. Except where Forrest accidentally became the world’s most interesting man, “Here” thinks life is like a box of regrets. Richard, a would-be artist who hawks life insurance, is smothered by his sense of duty. He’s a truculent take on Jimmy Stewart in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and if a story arc is your thing, you can decide he’s the antagonist. To Wright’s frustrated Margaret, this house is more than a framing device — it’s a trap.
The proscenium setup encourages Zemeckis to shoplift from “Death of a Salesman.” Since close-ups are rare, he’s directed the actors to play to the rafters and over-enunciate the themes with plucky theatricality. “Time flies!” Hanks grins. Nothing’s subtle. But the commitment becomes charming, like a pageant where all the children are wearing mustaches.
The eerily filtered faces of the two leads command attention, especially with Richard, a drinker, thickening at the jowls in ways we know Hanks won’t. The visual effects were done in collaboration with the A.I. company Metaphysic, who placed 4th on “America’s Got Talent” in 2022 with their synthetic singing Elvis. The effort to age Hanks and Wright from high school to retirement distracts from the we’re-all-just-ordinary-folks-here intentions. We must remind ourselves that Richard and Margaret represent patterns, not personalities, releasing them from the pressure to shoulder a narrative.
Don’t force a plot to emerge. Better to experience “Here” like open-eyed meditation, nodding at connections and ideas so fragile they’d disintegrate if said aloud. The roof leaks, Margaret’s water breaks. A man dies in the influenza epidemic, a woman dies from Covid. Why, I wondered, were the people of the past more inventive — more Zemeckis-ian — than the people of today? Does the 21st century have an equivalent to shopworn footage of The Beatles on Ed Sullivan? Around when a normal movie would have a dramatic climax, a mirror is pushed onscreen to reflect what’s behind the camera. Look! A stove! Then I reflected on my own setting. What existed before this movie theater? How many deer tiptoed here?
Richard and Margaret’s marriage is pained with fleeting joys. When the film is crammed full of their bittersweet memories, it pivots to celebrate the act of forgetting. Margaret, past her breaking point of yearning to be anywhere else but this very spot, says with a smile, “I love it here.” Life isn’t so bad when you zoom out for the big picture.
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