Review: Here

Image courtesy of Sony Pictures.

 
The concept for Robert Zemeckis' latest film, "Here," is ambitious but the execution, unfortunately, doesn't quite match it. In theory, the film sounds like a great idea - a reunion between the director of "Forrest Gump," one of the biggest films of the 1990s, with its two co-stars, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, that involves a time shifting narrative all from the perspective of a single camera angle from the corner of a room. 

The film is based on a graphic novel by Richard McGuire that tells the story of a single plot of land, from the dinosaurs to the colonial period of American history up through the 1920s and World War II and, finally, settling in to tell the story of a family from the 1940s to the present. The primary story in the film involves World War II veteran Al (Paul Bettany) and his wife, Rose (Kelly Reilly), and their children, one of whom grows up to be Richard (Tom Hanks).

The main concept at play in the film is that Richard and his wife, Margaret (Wright), live with Al and Rose and feel stuck in the house for decades, complicating their marriage, while at the same time Richard gives up his dream of being an artist to sell life insurance and Margaret regrets that she's never gotten out to see more of the world.

One of the film's primary stumbling blocks is its use of de-aging technology that makes Hanks and Wright look like younger versions of themselves. The somewhat plastic-looking versions of these actors often mute the emotions that their characters are emoting. The scenes in which they are older are more convincing.

There are some issues in the script department as well. Often, the characterizations feel a little skin deep and the fact that the film jumps back and forth in time so frequently - from story to story - means that any momentum that starts to build is quickly cut off during a scene, only to be replaced by stories taking place on the plot of land in the past, which include an aviator and his wary wife, an inventor and his significant other, Benjamin Franklin's grandson, some Native Americans living on the land before a home was placed there, and a Black family who move in after Richard and Margaret have moved on.

One example is a sequence during which the father of the Black family is explaining to his son how to act if he is ever pulled over by a cop. The scene's power is undercut by the fact that it is brief and then is quickly followed by some other foray into one of the past stories. Only Richard and Margaret's story is given any weight and even they are frequently interrupted by a quick jaunt back several hundred years.

"Forrest Gump" was a film that gave a tour of the 20th century through the eyes of its main character. "Here" occasionally includes landmarks as that film did - we hear The Beatles on TV for the first time, lots of reruns old TV shows, and the occasional needle drop ("Our House" is maybe a little too on the nose) - but it doesn't feel as momentous because we aren't seeing these moments through anyone's eyes so much as they are being used as indicators as to what year we are in at any given moment. While this is helpful from a narrative standpoint, the constant jumping around in time ends up giving all of the stories the short end of the stick.

"Here" has its moments - a reunion between two of the characters in the house and a home movie screening are effective scenes - but for those hoping for something that resembles Zemeckis' past hits, namely "Forrest Gump," his latest feels more like a conceptually interesting experiment that doesn't quite stick the landing.