'Here' Review: Tom Hanks and Robin Wright Boxed by Banal Story in Robert Zemeckis' Fixed-Camera Experiment

There is something typically American and direct about Norman Rockwell centering a study of multiple generations around the living room, with idealistic themes of home and family reinforced by scenes around the Christmas tree or dining table, fully expanded to accommodate the growing generation. At Thanksgiving, however, relative meaning isn't always attractive, even if moments of joy don't hide veins of sadness and despair. here.

The same goes for the idea of ​​shooting everything from the same fixed point and using the same wide angle – going back to prehistory and right up through contemporary times. In terms of technical craft, it's a bold experiment, but perhaps less ready for a dynamic narrative than an art installation. The narrowness of the frame compresses the storytelling, every time a key life moment is moved closer to the lens for emphasis.

Reunited with him Forrest Gump With screenwriter Eric Roth and stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, director Robert Zemeckis took his visual cues from the source material, Richard McGuire's 2014 graphic novel of the same name, expanded from a six-page comic strip published in the late '80s.

The interdisciplinary artist pushed the boundaries of the comic format by sticking to the exact same position in each panel. Set in the living room of a house built in 1902, her story spans millennia but focuses mainly on the 20th and 21st centuries. Most of these panels include one or more smaller panels that show the same place at different, non-chronological points in time.

Replicating the approach of the graphic novel three-dimensionally, Zemeckis' film becomes a living diorama with insets providing windows into the past and future. From a purely craft perspective, it's mesmerizing, even beautiful, for a while. Until it happens.

For years now Zemeckis has been fixated on technology and its visual capabilities, to the point where he has neglected the basics of story and character development. The vignettes here frequently return to the same family at different points in their lives, but rarely last long enough to sustain narrative momentum or give the characters much depth.

Apart from the self-imposed rigidity of the visual scheme, here will draw attention – perhaps in a divisive way – to another technological element that is more diffuse. The director used a generative AI tool from VFX studio Metaphysics to cast Hanks and Wright as Richard and Margaret, whose arcs, traced from high school through adulthood, dominate the film. Using archival images of the actors, the program outputs digital makeup that can be face-swapped with the cast as they perform.

It's more advanced and believable than Martin Scorsese's De-Aging Irishman Five years ago, allowed for greater elasticity and facial expression — even if the physicality of the actors' bodies wasn't always a perfect match, especially with Hanks as a teenager. But there's also something inherently terrifying about the process, especially at a time when many of us are worried about screen acting taking a more dehumanizing digital road.

The movie starts with a house under construction. It introduces the idea of ​​portraying different elements while combining them with first glimpses of furnishings from different periods and people representing different threads that will be elaborated throughout, some more than others. The opening scenes also plant the central idea in Roth and Zemeckis' screenplay of the house as a reservoir of memory, both lived experience and history.

The frame then jumps back in time to when the area was a primeval swamp, teeming with dinosaurs — until that landscape was destroyed in a fiery mass extinction event, turning first to rock and slowly to a green bursting with vegetation and (CG). ) fauna. A pair of young Native Americans (Joel Olette and Danny McCallum) share a kiss there, before another time jump reveals slaves building a colonial mansion.

We get snippets of life at home in different time periods: Pauline (Michelle Dockery) is an anxious wife and mother in the very early 20th century, afraid that her husband John's (Gwilym Lee) obsession with aviation will end in tragedy. Leo (David Finn) and Stella (Ophelia Lovibond) occupy the house for two decades, beginning in the mid-1920s. Unencumbered by children, they are a pair of witty, flamboyant semi-bohemians who luck out with the discovery of Leo's recliner. Their levity would be welcome in a film that is often weighed down by its earnestness.

The underdeveloped strand covers a black family, parents Devon (Nicholas Pinnock) and Helen Harris (Nikki Amuka-Bird) and their teenage son Justin (Kache Vanderpuye), who bought the house in 2015, when the $1 million price tag was deemed “a steal.” .”

Their presence shows how neighborhoods evolve and become more inclusive. But there's a nagging sense that the Harris family's work is largely representational, especially when their most visceral scene shows Devon and Helen sitting down to give Justin a serious talk about the rules of staying safe if he's pulled over by a cop while driving. . Their scenes also touch on the frightening first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic through the fate of their longtime Latina housekeeper (Anya Marco-Harris).

But much of the story centers on Richard's family, starting with his parents, Al (Paul Bettany) and Rose (Kelly Reilly), who bought the house in 1945. Al is fresh out of the army and suffering from undiagnosed conditions. PTSD, which causes him to drink. A child of depression, he worries about money, worrying that his salesman job won't cover the bills.

The firstborn of their four children, Richard (played by younger actors until Hanks came along), brings his high school sweetheart Margaret home to meet the family. When she expresses her intention to go first to college and then to law school, Al asks, “What's wrong with being a housewife?” He becomes even more blunt when Richard, a keen painter, reveals that he wants a career as a graphic artist: “Don't be a fool. Get a job where you wear a suit.”

Richard and Margaret married at 18 after becoming pregnant. In a heavy-handed nod to sons following in their father's footsteps, Richard packs up his paints and canvases. He takes a job selling insurance to support his family, although they continue to live with his parents. Margaret isn't comfortable in a home that doesn't feel like hers, creating troubling problems in the marriage. But Richard also inherited his father's fear of finances, which prevented them from taking risks on their own.

I wish I could say that I'm emotionally invested in the changes this family goes through, but aging, declining health, death, divorce, and most of all, everything is lifted from the most regular playbook of delayed dreams, sometimes to be accepted. will be next generation At Margaret's surprise 50th birthday party, Wright demurs with a somber speech about all the things he hopes to have accomplished by that age. It feels like a pale shadow of Patricia Arquette's similar — and far more economically articulate — scene. childhood.

Of all the moments in which the characters come on camera to say something important, the most embarrassing may be Richard's foreshadowing of duty, citing “a moment we'll always remember” while Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's “Our House” plays on the soundtrack. . This one felt straight out Saturday Night Live sketch

It is possible that people with a permanent fan Forrest Gump Seeing Hanks and Wright together will be fascinating enough, influencing the outcome of their characters. But others may remain stubbornly dry-eyed despite Alan Silvestri's syrupy score troweling on sentiment.

For a film that covers such a broad passage of American life, here Feels curiously weightless. That's no fault of the actors, all of whom deliver solid work with characters that are little more than outlines. One cannot fully escape cinema's preoccupation with visual technology at the expense of the heart.

Historical detours return to colonial times when English loyalist William Franklin (Daniel Bates), conveniently parked in a horse-drawn carriage, grumbles to his wife about his father Benjamin's (Keith Bartlett) radical politics. (The less said about the cut to Richard and his younger brother at a costume party as Benjamin Franklins duet, the better.) There are brief scenes of the Revolutionary War. And there's a sketchy account of an Aboriginal couple's pre-settlement life, raising their own family and enduring their loss.

But this is characteristic of an episodic screenplay that finds no opportunity to elaborate its themes, much less a clichéd line of dialogue, and even the Native American thread is tied up in a neat bow. This happens when members of the archaeological society stop by and ask to wander around the garden, suspecting that the house may have been built on an important site. Lo and behold…

Only at the very end does DP Don Burgess's camera move from its fixed point in the living room, wandering outside the house to the tidy suburbs that surround it. But a clearly fake CG hummingbird is the ultimate reminder of what almost everything is about here is synthetic.