Here (2024) review

Dir. Robert Zemeckis

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★½

For the last 15 years, it’s as if Robert Zemeckis has been making films he hopes will find an audience. Of course when you’re the man behind the Back to the Future trilogy, it’s far easier to get budgets exceeding $50 million for films about high wire artist Philippe Petit’s death-defying walk between the Twin Towers, or another where a disabled Steve Carrell spends his adult life playing with miniatures.

These pictures might’ve come and gone, leaving nothing resembling a cultural impact, but I’ve long admired Zemeckis for being two things: an experimentalist when it comes to technology and an unabashed sentimentalist. Such an amalgam isn’t always pretty (Mars Needs Moms, on which he was a producer), but even at 72-years-old, Zemeckis remains as open as anyone to play with new toys. His latest works might put technology at the forefront, but what always remains is something resembling the human condition.

One could say all his experimentation has led us Here, a film based on Richard McGuire’s comic-strip-turned-graphic novel. The revered work depicts a singular plot of land over the course of thousands of years, from its primordial past to its distinctly modern future. In nonlinear fashion, we see this land inhabited by dinosaurs, First Nation lovers, the inventor of the La-Z-Boy recliner of all things, and a middle class couple, whose story dominates the narrative.

The couple is Richard and Margaret, played by Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, reunited for the first time since Forrest Gump 30 years ago. They met as teens in what appears to be the 1960s, had a daughter early, and without much money, decided to stay in Richard’s childhood home, along with his alcoholic father, Al (Paul Bettany), and patient mother, Rose (Kelly Reilly). Their marriage is not without moments of happiness, but these prove fleeting, as Richard gives up his ambitions as an artist and Margaret’s pleas for them to move out of his parents’ home fall on deaf ears.

Zemeckis’ camera remains positioned in a high-angle shot for the duration of the film; one that goes from being a sightline of vast fields frozen over by the Ice Age to an estate inhabited by William Franklin (Benjamin’s illegitimate child). Here loftily tries to capture the essence of human existence by showing this piece of land’s seismic changes over thousands of years. At the turn of the 20th century, when on which a house is erected, it becomes home to a couple amidst the deadly Spanish flu, the aforementioned recliner inventor and his pin-up model wife, and later, Al and Rose, who purchase the house via Al’s GI bill grant and subsequently try to raise a family.

Zemeckis tries to adapt the look-and-feel of a graphic novel by having various square and rectangular panels pepper the screen during transition moments. Sometimes, individual panels linger and lead to perplexing images, such as a frame of a television existing on Native American land, or a picture-in-picture shot of a character from a separate timeline existing in a completely different one. The structure takes time to take shape.

Hanks and Wright are de-aged in a way that is convincing, I suppose, if you don’t stare at their faces too long. Hanks’ voice has grown gruffer in recent years, making it a slight mismatch with his boyish, Big-era face; Wright more seamlessly adapts with the technology by having a comparatively softer drawl.

Similar to We Live in Time, Here is a story that might’ve been better told linearly. To see the land’s gradual progression from a grassy plain to a family home would’ve likely led to more character development. Terribly underserved not only are the First Nation individuals (to call them “characters” would be downright dishonest), and later, a Black family who inhabit the house in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. The longest scene they’re afforded involves the parents giving their teenaged son a lecture on what to do if he’s pulled over by the police. It rings hollow.

Here is filled with quietly moving moments, such as Richard being forced to grapple with his aging parents, and the carefree existence of the inventor and his whimsical wife provide some light-hearted comedy for a film that leans heavily on mawkishness. Disconnected in this, however, is the common thread between the eight-or-nine ongoing narratives other than some shared experiences such as pregnancy, loss, grief, and young people’s initial excitement of starting a life together.

I was consistently engaged with Here. Zemeckis’ love of experimentation is on full display, and there’s a voyeuristic quality insofar that this is a film predicated on so many small moments and seemingly banal interactions that at times these fragmented vignettes do manage to feel lived-in. Many of Here‘s qualities that I appreciated will make others outright loathe it. In an era where too many blockbusters feel sanitized with a corporate sheen, rendering films cursed with a smothering structural sameness, I laud Zemeckis for continuing to play outside the sandbox, even if it results in a picture as intriguing as it is uneven.

Starring: Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Paul Bettany, Kelly Reilly, Michelle Dockery, Gwilym Lee, Ophelia Lovibond, David Fynn, Leslie Zemeckis, Jonathan Aris, and Daniel Betts. Directed by: Robert Zemeckis.