HERE (2024)
Starring Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Paul Bettany, Kelly Reilly, Michelle Dockery, Gwilym Lee, Ophelia Lovibond, David Fynn, Leslie Zemeckis, Lauren McQueen, Beau Gadsdon, Jonathan Aris, Albie Salter, Harry Marcus, Lilly Aspell, Joel Oulette, Dannie McCallum, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Anya Marco Harris, Mohammed George, Dexter Sol Ansell and Stuart Bowman.
Screenplay by Eric Roth and Robert Zemeckis.
Directed by Robert Zemeckis.
Distributed by TriStar Pictures. 104 minutes. Rated PG-13.
It’s hard to believe that it’s been 30 years since Forrest Gump. All this time later, the stars (Tom Hanks and Robin Wright), the writer (Eric Roth) and the director (Robert Zemeckis) have reunited for a new film. Gump has always had a bit of a weird reputation. Many people – me included – very much enjoyed Forrest Gump. It even won the Best Picture Oscar. Yet, at the same time, many people who don’t like it consider the film to be sappy and condescending, and these critics do have some very legitimate points.
Not to worry, though, for better or worse, other than some of the same talent Here really has little in common with Forrest Gump. In fact, Here is pretty unique to itself. It is not taking a traditional storytelling path. Instead of focusing on characters – although there are quite a few characters in the film – this movie is particularly about a setting. Very specifically, the living room of a small but charming 250-year-old house. Here tracks what has happened on this specific plot of land over the centuries – starting with the dinosaurs and ending in the present day. (There are a few early segments from before the house was built, in which it is merely a field or a road.)
I can respect that kind of story idea – who hasn’t passed by houses and wondered what was going on in them, or what had happened there? I particularly am intrigued by this kind of idea because I too live in an old house and have often pondered about its history. My house is not quite as old as the house in Here. It’s about 125 years old – the official building date on record is 1900, but I have been told several times that is because they didn’t keep records before 1900, so it is quite probably older than that.
So why not take a look at the history of a place? The people who have lived and died there, the joy and pain experienced there, the parties, the funerals, the hopes, and the dreams. It’s an interesting idea for a film, although eventually it turns out that it is not exactly a cinematic one, or at least it doesn’t quite work as well as the filmmakers would have hoped.
Much of what happens in Here feels random, which I suppose even makes a certain amount of sense, because it is not the story of people so much as it is the story of a place. Some characters connect, others don’t, the storyline flips back and forth through time, and the whole story seems to have no true through line – unless again you count the single room in which pretty much all of the action occurred.
We meet and then move away from many people over the years, to the point that the audience feels like it is not really learning enough about any of the main characters. Essentially, the Here house has four families living in it over the years, although it even skips further back in time to the indigenous people who once lived on the land and the Revolutionary war-era citizens who built the huge house nearby that will become the center view of the living room window for the yet-to-be-built home.
With all of these characters flittering in and out of the storyline, it becomes a bit difficult to build up a relationship with many of these characters. (The Native Americans, the colonials and a furniture inventor who is married to a pin-up model seem to have particularly little to do here…)
Much of the narrative revolves around a two-generation family which kept the house for decades – the mother Rose and father Al (Kelly Reilly and Paul Bettany) eventually leave the house to one of their sons Richard and his wife Margaret (Hanks and Wright), who end up spending much of their life there.
Quite frankly, had Here focused on this one family they would have had more than enough for a more engaging storyline. Also, Here does spend more time with these characters than any other, but every time you start to build up an interest in the character arcs, the film suddenly moves back or forth in time to another story, losing the narrative momentum.
Speaking of Hanks and Wright, through some very disturbing de-aging tricks, they end up playing their characters from age 18 until sometime in their 70s or 80s. The old-age makeup in their later years is all right and mostly normal although it probably is done with SFX, but the computerized de-aging effects are distracting and unrealistic. It is as if director Zemeckis is still trying to sell us on his motion-capture process that made Hanks look so creepy in The Polar Express when he is the only one who doesn’t get how wrong it all looks. To make it even more disorienting, most of their de-aged shots were done in extreme close-up, which made the flaws even more noticeable.
Here was an interesting film experiment and, in some sections, it is quite beautiful. However, it doesn’t quite work.
Jay S. Jacobs
Copyright ©2024 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: October 30, 2024.
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