Erik Adams
Here opens in theaters November 1.
With its camera plunked down in the corner of a living room for 104 minutes, Robert Zemeckis’ Here takes us through the life of one American family, the Youngs, through much of the 20th century. Using frames-within-frames to transition between decades (and provide glimpses of the people who occupied this space before and after the Youngs), life in all its hues is captured at a fixed, observational distance. It’s an intriguing concept, but Zemeckis may be too much of a sentimentalist to make it work. The technological tinkering that once elevated his filmmaking but has entirely consumed it for the past 20 years (seen here in the dire de-aging of stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright) certainly doesn’t help, but the problems plaguing Here are rooted in its conception. The film is based on Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic novel of the same name (and its six-page predecessor from 1989) – an experimental comic that has now spawned a disappointingly straightforward dramatic adaptation.
The cast and crew are, in theory, just as much of a selling point as the one-angle gimmick. It reunites the director with his Forrest Gump cast and crew: actors Hanks and Wright, screenwriter Eric Roth, composer Alan Silvestri, and cinematographer Don Burgess. You can also hear the echoes of Forrest Gump in the way that Zemeckis and Roth use the roadmap of McGuire’s comic – a more contemplative work about the spaces we occupy – to chart the Young family’s trajectory through major events in U.S. history. And not just boomer glorifying Gump territory like the Vietnam War – Here preposterously ties the Young home into important American achievements like Benjamin Franklin harnessing electricity and the invention of the La-Z-Boy recliner.
A handful of other characters occupy the suburban Pennsylvania duplex in the ’20s and ’40s, but the movie’s core plot begins after World War II, as short-fused returning soldier Al Young (Paul Bettany, using a shaky American accent that barely hides his Englishness) purchases the property with his pregnant wife Rose (Kelly Reilly). Before long, the couple has three kids, one of whom grows up to be aspiring teenage artist Richard (Hanks, sporting a digital facelift that never makes him seem any younger than 40), who brings his high-school girlfriend Margaret (Wright, not treated any kinder by the visual effects) over to meet the parents.
Hanks, who plays a kind of stand-in for McGuire not seen in the comic, is a graphic designer who only seems to draw his own living room – the space in the comic was based on McGuire’s own home, but surely he had other interests? Wright, meanwhile, is mostly tasked with awkwardly stepping into close-ups to deliver (and subsequently explain) thematic dialogue about the fleeting nature of time. This sensation is often verbally referenced, but rarely felt, thanks to seamless and mechanical editing that never slows down to focus on emotions like joy or anguish, but simply shoves them through a temporal revolving door.
Hanks and Wright, in their turn-back-the-clock states, have a dead-eyed quality, as though we’re watching action figures of the two stars enact domestic scenarios. Here tries to be a cinematic translation of McGuire’s work, but given the distinctly theatrical quality of its presentation, it would’ve been more believable to dress Hanks and Wright up in wigs and makeup to make them seem younger. Between its singular vantage point, Bettany’s melodramatic performance and strained accent, the occasional use of the moon as a spotlight for soliloquy, and even wings for the characters to enter and exit scenes – a doorway to the left, and another space “downstage,” just off camera – the movie often feels like a taped stage production, albeit with the glossy sheen of modern VFX.
Unfortunately, not every actor is on the same page about this tonal approach. Hanks, as though he knows the effects might limit his expressions, is as wildly animated as Woody from Toy Story, while Wright delivers understated work alongside him, a disconnect that follows them through the years. Michelle Dockery is committed to the somber pauses and dry irony typical of live drama when she plays Mrs. Harter, who lives in the house in the 1910s, while her daredevil pilot husband John (Gwilym Lee) is performed with more of a broad, Chaplin-esque wink for the camera. Perhaps the only actors who seem to be on the same page are Ophelia Lovibond and David Fynn as a randy couple in the 1940s, who fill the screen with life and energy – the only actors to really do so.
However, as Here hops around between eras (going as far back as to show what was happening on the surrounding land before the house was built), it takes on a rote, inhuman quality. The time jumps become more obligatory than thought-provoking, creating an awkward middle ground between condensed montages and complete dramatic scenes, resulting in the emotional effects of neither. With only that single camera angle in play, the editing and performances become responsible for all the dramatic impact – but they seem to work against one another. As soon as Hanks or Wright begin digging into the lingering disagreements between their characters, we’re whisked away to some other period in their lives, or to some other family entirely.
Superficially, this is not unlike McGuire’s non-linear approach. However, both versions of his Here comic are about the sum total of recognizable human experiences, rather than the stories of individual characters, and his overlapping panels exist to depict past and present simultaneously, not to simply to move the story from one time period to the next. The comics also span much further in both directions, ruminating on the origins of life on Earth, and finding thrilling and sobering ways to move into the far future. Zemeckis’ film, for the most part, compresses the breadth of the comics into what is essentially a saga of the modern United States, ending in the present day – like redoing Forrest Gump’s survey of the so-called “American century” in close quarters.
Pre-colonial Native American characters briefly feature (as they do in the comic), but in attempting to craft a mawkish retrospective of the U.S., Here simply glosses over the darker implications of the country’s history, and of the Youngs’ home being built on a Native burial site. Where McGuire could afford to use implication, given the ephemeral quality of each page, Zemeckis has no such luxury since he’s working in a more traditionally dramatic form. While no family or character is central to the comic, this is a far more drawn-out affair, given the blinkered focus on Richard and Margaret’s uneasy romance. McGuire’s pages skip quickly between epochs, but the movie draws out its central drama before hastily cutting away from it, creating gaps it can only fill with awkward gestures towards unsavory realities, like racism past and present.
Most unfortunate of all are the fleeting moments where it seems like Here might burst to life cinematically, both as an adaptation, and on its own terms. In Forrest Gump fashion (à la the famous floating feather), a hovering hummingbird seems to connect the various decades and centuries together. But this is one of several poorly rendered digital artifacts that might’ve been more acceptable to the eye if there were a few more layers of artifice separating us from the images on screen – if they were filmed in 3D, for instance. In addition to the elements that threaten to enhance and deepen the space of the Youngs’ living room (without actually doing so), the filmmakers do actually use all three dimensions at their disposal on the rarest of occasions, between a single camera move during an important moment, as well as the brief introduction of a mirror so we can glimpse characters and scenes beyond the camera’s view. This barely lasts a minute, rendering Here’s identity as a specifically cinematic adaptation of McGuire’s work practically null.
What we have here is little more than a stylistic mimicry of the comics, which take the form they do in order to play with the boundaries of the page and the panel in the first place. There’s no formal experimentation or forward momentum to Zemeckis’ Here. If anything, it’s a regression, between the removal of camera movement and shot variety that require a reliance on pre-cinema stagecraft and the stubborn fidelity to McGuire’s two-dimensional compositions. Unfortunately, its characters are just as flat, resulting in a film more interested in physical interiors than emotional ones.
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