It's a Forrest Gump reunion as director Robert Zemeckis, writer Eric Roth, stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, composer Alan Silvestri and cinematographer Don Burgess all reteam for Here, a shambolic adaptation of a ground-breaking 2014 graphic novel by Richard McGuire, itself an expansion of a six-panel story published in 1989. Forrest Gump saw Hanks play a man-child who unwittingly stumbles in and out of some of the key events of the second half of the twentieth century. In Here, such events simply play out on a TV or radio in the corner of the living room of a house in New Jersey. The movie instead focuses on the relatively mundane events in the lives of the residents of said house.
As with the graphic novel, the story is told from a single perspective, with Zemeckis's camera locked in a corner of the room. From this vantage point we see various residents of the home from the 1910s to today. In the 1910s live a pioneering aviator (Gwilym Lee) and his anxious wife (Michelle Dockery). In the early '40s the tenants are an inventor (David Fynn) and his pinup model wife (Ophelia Lovibond). In the 2010s the house is purchased by an African-American couple (Nicholas Pinnock, Nikki Amuka-Bird). The non-linear narrative occasionally takes us back further, right back to the dinosaurs, and forward to the American War of Independence, with some glimpses of the patch of land being inhabited by Native-Americans.
But the core storyline runs from the end of WWII to the 2000s and follows the Young family. Returning soldier Al Young (Paul Bettany) and his wife Rose (Robin Wright) move into the home in the late '40s and become a model American suburban family in the '50s, raising three children. The oldest child, Richard (Hanks), emerges as the film's central figure along with his girlfriend/wife Margaret (Wright). We watch as Margaret becomes pregnant as a teen, hurriedly marrying Richard as a result. They have their own daughter, Vanessa (Zsa Zsa Zemeckis), and tensions rise as Richard repeatedly finds excuses to deny Margaret's pleas to move out of the crowded home.
McGuire's 1989 comic strip received its own screen adaptation in 1991 courtesy of a short made by students at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and Zemeckis's film takes its visual cues from this short, with screens within the screen playing snippets from differing time periods at once. The short is only six minutes long and works for what it is: an experiment. Expanding this idea to feature length proves a severe test of the viewer's patience however. As Zemeckis constantly flips back and forth between the narrative's various time periods the effect is like watching a TV whose remote control is in the hands of a toddler with ADHD. None of the scenes last more than a minute, meaning Roth's dialogue is written in a clunky manner crudely designed to quickly get the point of every scene across post haste, while Silvestri's intrusive score makes it all too clear when we're expected to laugh or cry. Nuance simply isn't on the menu here and the drama never gets a chance to breathe.
Zemeckis has spent much of this century making films that combine sub-Spielberg sentimentality with technical experimentation, largely with disastrous results. This trend continues in particularly frustrating fashion here. A new technique for de-aging actors is put to use here, but the result is the waxy, uncanny valley look that has dogged every other movie to attempt such a thing. As the young Richard, Hanks looks like the Madame Tussaud's version of his Big-era self, while for some reason the technology struggles to make Wright look any younger than 40, making Margaret the oldest looking teenager since Luke Perry in Beverly Hills 90210. The aging never feels naturally progressive, with characters turning grey overnight, and the fiftysomething Richard looks a decade older than the current sixtysomething Hanks does in real life. Era signifiers like music and fashion are deployed haphazardly (when we see Vanessa dancing around in leg-warmers while sporting a perm we assume it's the mid '80s, only to be told it's the late '70s, and the '40s couple are seen dancing to '50s cha-cha music), making it confusing for the viewer to figure out what decade we're supposed to be witnessing. The single camera position creates a staginess, with some scenes staged in awkward fashion to ensure the actors are facing the camera. Shot in London's Pinewood Studios, the film is lumbered with a supporting cast full of Brits, many of whom struggle with their American accents.
It's all a big mess, which is frustrating as there are moments that hint at the affecting look at the passage of time this might have been in the hands of a filmmaker more interested in humans than gadgets. Despite being lumbered with digital balaclavas, Hanks and Wright are very good here, the two actors doing their best to get to the heart of the story amid so much clutter. In the last couple of scenes the movie finally ditches the editing tools and lets Hanks and Wright share a couple of substantial scenes together. For all their sentimentality, these final simple scenes prove undeniably touching. But by that point it's too late and we're left to wish Zemeckis cared less about his film's setting and more about the people who inhabit it.
Directed by: Robert Zemeckis
Starring: Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Paul Bettany, Kelly Reilly, Michelle Dockery, Gwilym Lee, David Fynn, Ophelia Lovibond
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