Robert Zemeckis’ Here arrives with an ambitious framing device in that the entire story is told through one static camera placement. Through this fixed position we witness the early days of Earth when dinosaurs roamed freely. But like his fellow filmmakers from the Baby Boomer generation, Zemeckis’ primary interest lay not in the Mesozoic Era, but rather in the twentieth century. And that’s where Here settles down, in the living room of a house built on a plot of land in what becomes eastern Pennsylvania.
Employing a non-linear narrative, Here jumps back and forth to check in on a host of families who occupy this house across generations. But the central focus traces the love story between Richard (Tom Hanks) and Margaret (Robin Wright), appearing together in a Zemeckis project thirty years after Best Picture winner Forrest Gump. Zemeckis has always implemented technological advancements in his cinema (to varying returns) and in Here, Hanks and Wright play the teenage versions of their characters with the assistance of de-aging technology.
Lensed by longtime Zemeckis collaborator Don Burgess, the visuals carry a distinct digital sheen (which unfortunately reminded me at times of painter Thomas Kinkade), lessening the potentially distracting effects of the de-aging elements—it all feels tonally of a piece. Carried over from Richard McGuire’s graphic novel source material, Here make frequent use of on-screen rectangular frames which attempts to bridge connections between eras. A record player in the past might appear in a corner rectangle briefly playing old music during a contemporary check-in on the house. It’s an interesting idea but too closely resembles an Ikea catalog, or lends the impression of a polished commercial, specifically those Google ads which seek to tug heartstrings while proselytizing about how their technology can help users document time spent with family over the years.
The rapid-fire pace at which we jump in and out of these different time periods means we never sit with any storyline or character long enough to form meaningful emotional connections. Scenes often hinge on pithy punchlines and some land better than others. The humor carries a wholesome boomer sensibility, which includes a literal record scratch sound effect after a teenage Richard tells his family that his girlfriend Margaret is pregnant.
Without camera maneuvers, the blocking within the frame takes on increased importance, and characters consciously appear to be hitting marks. At one point, a blue ribbon is held up by their daughter in a manner so that the audience can see it, but away from her parents. Here is full of moments where the limitations of this singular camera angle seems to be dictating the acting and staging in an unnatural manner, resembling theater more than cinema. The lifeless, complex choreography of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma came to mind, where characters seem to perform an action because the camera is now on them, ceasing to exist again once the dolly moves beyond them. Here carries that same sense of dolls being arranged in a dollhouse.
It’s hard not to ponder what could’ve been if the script had ditched the non-linear structure of the graphic novel and told this story in order. That might’ve allowed the house itself to naturally emerge as its own character, a clear goal of the narrative when you consider the film’s final shot. Or if some of these subplots were excised or minimized (there is a perplexing storyline involving Benjamin Franklin), the emotional core lacking in Richard and Margaret’s relationship could’ve been more developed. For a film attempting to ponder the behemoth topic of time, the overstuffed runtime seems to be running out of it at every corner.
In an inspired bit of against-type casting, Hanks is not the honorable everyman who finds the inner resolve to do the right thing, as is so often his role throughout Zemeckis contemporary Steven Spielberg’s filmography. Here he is a mediocre company man whose chief qualities of pragmatism and rolling with the punches lead him to a nice family life, but it is a tenuous one with constant economic pressure looming around every corner. When he gives up his dreams of becoming an artist after Margaret gets pregnant, you don’t sense he spends too much time pondering the decision or regretting it in the subsequent decades. Richard’s inner peace with accepting the life he was given rings authentic in a film that too often feels constructed and openly artificial. In one story thread, a man invents the La-Z-Boy chair in this living room, vacating the house with his wife for sunnier California skies. But no such big break lay in store for Richard. When Hanks begins painting again later in life, Here seems to suggest he’s not even that talented at his craft, or perhaps decades of not picking up a brush or pencil eroded any innate skill. For a filmmaker often accused of being saccharine, Here highlights Zemeckis’ clear skepticism on the diminishing returns of the American Dream. There is a cynical streak in Here and Zemeckis’ larger body of work that often goes unnoticed.
In ways, Here plays as the anti-Boyhood. Whereas Richard Linklater’s epic realizes that it is in the collection of small, seemingly insignificant moments in life that can build to an emotionally resonant conclusion over a feature-length runtime, screenwriter Eric Roth’s adaptation frequently shoehorns in crowd-pleasing scenes—ones that would never plausibly occur in this space. Richard and Margaret’s wedding is inexplicably staged in the living room purely for us to witness (what home wedding doesn’t occur in a backyard?) The entire project carries a blatant insecurity that audiences will grow bored with this fixed camera angle, and so it does everything within its power to keep viewers engaged. It’s 127 Hours with Danny Boyle’s ADHD energy that never lets you sit with James Franco’s trapped hiker.
After Here’s world premiere at AFI Fest this past weekend, I popped over to catch the Q&A for Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, also playing the fest. With that film and Happer’s Comet, Taormina illuminates Here’s fundamental misunderstanding of what makes a space in a home special. Memories are so often mundane: when reflecting on your childhood living room, you might warmly recall waking up in the middle of the night after falling asleep on the couch, the TV glow illuminating the space at this unique hour in a never-before-experienced manner. Here shows little interest in capturing such details.
Designed to go down easy, Zemeckis deserves credit for crafting a palatable narrative out of this single-camera viewpoint which might otherwise turn off general audiences. But paradoxically the film’s centuries-spanning journey is a shallow, inconsequential one.
Here premiered at AFI Fest and opens in theaters Friday.
The post AFI Fest Review: Robert Zemeckis’ Here Plays Like the Anti-Boyhood first appeared on The Film Stage.
