It’s been almost forty years since Robert Zemeckis made time travel hilarious and fascinating with the blockbuster “Back to the Future.” That was a film about a 1980s teenager traveling back to the 1950s and observing the not-so-subtle changes that befell his hometown and family in the last three decades. And also, his teenage mom tries really hard to sleep with him. It’s a weird film, if we’re being honest.
Zemeckis has had an interesting relationship with time throughout most of his films. “Forrest Gump” attempts to track, through a smug and somewhat condescending lens, the whole second half of the 20th century. His horror comedy “Death Becomes Her” explores the comical vanity that underlies our fear of aging and mortality. “A Christmas Carol” is a tale of personal growth and regret through supernatural time-hopping. The list goes on and on, and it’s led him all the way here.
Sorry, I mean, it’s led us all the way to “Here,” a new drama that takes place over multiple millennia, entirely from the perspective of a single camera angle. In many respects it’s a distillation of themes the filmmaker has explored throughout his entire career. The concept is incredibly ambitious. The execution is dinner theater.
“Here” reduces all of human history to the events that preceded and occurred immediately after a generic tale of quiet suburban desperation, starring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright as Richard and Margaret. They’re teen lovers who get pregnant in the mid-20th and put their dreams on hold to raise their daughter. They don’t have much money, so they settle into Richard’s childhood home, along with his alcoholic father Al (Paul Bettany) and long-suffering mother Rose (Kelly Reilly). They’ve all given up on themselves and then life just passes them by; their valuable time wasted by family commitments and compromises.
Meanwhile, over the course of the rest of history, dinosaurs go extinct, a pair of First Nations lovers have a couple paltry minutes of screen time, Benjamin Franklin’s asshole son whines about the American revolution and the guy who invented the La-Z-Boy invents the La-Z-Boy (who could have seen that one coming?). The sum totality of human existence plays out in one slightly high angle camera shot, with the aid of frequently underwhelming visual effects. Hanks and Bettany are convincingly aged and de-aged. Nobody else is. And whenever “Here” leaves Richard and Margaret’s version of this living room, the whole film looks like a green screen tech demo that’s almost entirely finished. Almost.
All that effort and innovation and ambition amounts, in Zemeckis’ film, to little more than a mawkish intergenerational drama. “Here” genuinely seems to believe that the history of the world peaked with the possibility of mom and dad getting a divorce. There’s something to be said for the human tendency to make everything all about ourselves and our own limited field of vision, but “Here” doesn’t say any of that. Zemeckis’ movie is not about living with blinders on, it’s about revealing connections between the little and big moments of our distant past and our present — but for some reason, not our future.
We don’t get any images of humanity’s demise or of space aliens moving into Richard and Margaret’s house. Not that we needed those images specifically, but “Here” lacks playfulness and that’s rather annoying. There are moments of levity, but they’re forgettable sitcom jokes. Zemeckis’ attempts to play out multiple eras simultaneously through the use of on-screen comic book panels are rarely pushed for their innovative potential, and instead are mostly utilized as gradual scene transitions. The technique contributes little to our greater understanding of the commonalities between all these eras other than to point out that, you know, life’s little moments tend to happen to everyone. A leaky ceiling is a bit like a woman’s water breaking, apparently. Makes you think. Specifically, it makes you think about how we didn’t need anyone to go through this much effort to make that obvious a visual connection.
“Here” is based on an ambitious graphic novel by Richard McGuire, who used similar visual mechanics to make the reader aware of time’s passage in a complicated and illuminating way. Before it was 300 pages, it was a six-page strip. Zemeckis’ film feels like a padded adaptation of the short version, and his long-observed tendency to release trailers that show his audience the whole movie has the unfortunate side-effect of demonstrating just how much more interesting “Here” might have been at a fraction of its length. The director seems fascinated by the possibilities of making a movie with a single camera angle, but without the limitations of a stage. Sadly, the narrative he’s crafted is so perfunctory and shallow that “Here” has more in common with an ornate museum diorama than a powerful motion picture.
At its best, “Here” isn’t a familial drama, it’s a sad haunted house movie. Ghost stories are about how history refuses to leave us, often to tragic effect. The living room in “Here” is always populated by the people who used to live there, even after they’ve died. But we never get a sense of the house or its personality, which is an odd choice given that 95% of the movie takes place there. It’s nothing more than a husk in which living things often dwell. I feel bad for that house. It’s got a lot more going on than any of its residents. But even when Robert Zemeckis tries, in the end, to make us feel like people loved this home after a lifetime of saying they hated it, it’s not cathartic. It’s empty and unconvincing, which is the opposite of what “Here” was going for.
“Here” opens in theaters on Nov. 1 after premiering Friday at AFI Fest.
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