Robert Zemeckis clearly has a thing for time – past, present, and Back To The Future. With a filmography that also includes films like Polar Express and especially his Oscar winning Best Picture Forrest Gump, the director loves mixing the newest filmmaking technologies with relatable stories that play with our perceptions of life as time goes by. He really dives into this theme in a big way in his ambitious adaptation of Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic novel, Here, which does not send its century+ cast of characters back in time, but rather lets time come to them on a single piece of land, later a home over the course of the entire 20th century, a bit before that and a bit after. The great French director Claude LeLouch did a similar thing in 1974’s splendid romance And Now My Love in which a couple’s chance meeting at first sight is prefaced by a century of different generations we meet whose varied lives lived all lead to that one moment.
Here takes the idea of focusing the audience’s gaze on one particular place in the universe as we watch people come and people go through triumph, happiness, sorrow, heartache, and most of all family set in one home starting in the early 1900’s and continuing to today. Actually the film really starts briefly in the age of dinosaurs, moving along to the land of Native Americans, to none other than Benjamin Franklin and his brood, and finally into this one house where Zemeckis has audaciously set his camera in a stable position in order to capture all these people going about their daily lives in front of us, almost as if we are watching a play. In fact I kept thinking Here would make a great theatrical piece with the opportunity for dazzling changes of scenery on one set as actors come and go in constant action. But instead Zemeckis and his Forrest Gump Oscar winning co-writer Eric Roth have gone the cinematic route,and even with a static camera manage to keep it all visually interesting using panels of different moments constantly popping up on screen changing the scenes, time periods, and characters as they get enveloped in this tapestry of humanity.
Along the way we are in 1908 meeting Pauline (Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery), a well appointed woman worried about her flying-obsessed husband. We also meet a couple who live in an overcrowded version of the house who stumble on to a million dollar marketing idea that becomes the Lazy Boy lounger. An African American family moves in at a more recent point. But the main focus is eventually on our stars and their extended family including Al (Paul Bettany) who returns traumatized from WWII, starting a family with housewife Rose (Kelly Reilly), a typical marriage of the post-war period with their son, Richard (Hanks) who we watch grow up, find teenage love with school mate Margaret. She becomes pregnant and thus the pair are married at a very young age and living with Al and Rose, a situation that becmes strained as they must bring up daughter Vanessa and make money to support a family, deferring Richard’s artistic ambitions and Margaret’s own dreams of adventures beyond this house.
It takes a while to get into the groove of Here which imagines what the walls of a house might see with a revolving door of human beings passing through it in different eras. It took me some time to warm up to what at first seems a bit gimmicky, zipping us back and forth into these disparate lives but never getting to know them enough to really become invested in their travails, that is until the film’s second half when Hanks and Wright’s story takes center stage. Both stars have been superbly digitally de-aged to play their younger selves, and at other points made up to appear older, with other moments not requiring the makeup treatment. They are flawless, even if their own marriage travels down fairly predictable paths, staying together, coming apart,frustrations, health problems, the stuff of life. In between the TV, from a black and white 50’s model, to a color set, to a big screen television on the wall tells us where these families are in the scheme of things, as do Thanksgiving dinners, a staple the film returns to over and over. Scenes change outside the big window as we see horse drawn carriages give way to automobiles and a bustling neighborhood all in the background of the main action.
The use of those panels to constantly switch things up, some big, some smaller, focusing on where we go next in this house that is Production Designer’s dream assignment and PD Ashley Lamont keeps it humming. In fact the house is as big a star as any human acting in it. Editor Jesse Goldsmith deserves kudos for some very tricky film editing with all those panels that are a more modest version of what Norman Jewison used in The Thomas Crown Affair. In that 1968 film it was all for style. Zemeckis wants the device to keep the action flowing and the individual stories integrated. His frequent composer Alan Silvestri another Gump veteran delivers a vibrant uplifting score that helps.
Beyond Hanks and Wright giving fine performances as usual , Bettany, and to a lesser degree, Reilly are the only supporting players with any kind of substantial role, particularly Bettany as a man driven to drinking too much and full of regrets he doesn’t want to pass on to his son.
Here is a noble experiment, and a welcome dose of originality in a year full of sequels, even if it doesn’t quite work on every level. For me I tried mightily to resist its emotional pull, but by the end I finally surrendered to it and shed more than one tear in thinking about our ever-changing place on this earth and how we have to somehow hold on to what is good in this life, even in the darkest of times.
And in the spirit of Here as I sat in the iconic Chinese theatre at last night’s AFI Fest debut I thought about all the incredible classic films that have played in this single location over the course of its storied Hollywood history and wondered what stories these walls could tell about premieres gone by.
Producers of the Miramax and Image Movers production are Zemeckis, Derek Hogue, Jack
Rapke, and Bill Block.
Title: Here
Festival: AFI Fest
Distributor: Sony Pictures (Tri Star)
Release Date: November 1, 2024
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Screenplay: Eric Roth and Robert Zemeckis
Cast: Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Paul Bettany, Kelly Reilly, Michelle Dockery, Nikki Amuka-Bird
Rating: PG13
Running Time: 1 Hour and 44 Minutes