Here | 2024
Tom Hanks and Robin Wright in HERE.
Director Robert Zemeckis was arguably one of the biggest filmmakers of the 1980s and 90s, delivering mega-hits like Back to the Future (1985), Romancing the Stone (1984), Forrest Gump (1994), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1992), Contact(1997), and Cast Away (2000) throughout those two decades. Things changed in the 2000s, however, as he became fixated on mo-cap animation, as films like The Polar Express (2004), Beofulf (2007), and A Christmas Carol (2009) came to dominate his filmography.
His later period has been spotty at best, churning out remakes of The Witches (2020) and Pinocchio (2022) for streaming on Disney+. Despite a few mid-tier highlights like Flight (2012) and Allied (2016), he's seemed a kind of shadow of the filmmaker he once was. Enter Here, a late-style experiment that combines the vibrancy and energy of his early years with his more recent dabblings in boundary-pushing technology.
Based on the graphic novel by Richard McGuire, Here takes place in one room, in front of a fixed camera, over the course of centuries, even millennia, capturing the passage of time across generations and the life, joy, and heartache that comes and goes through that one place. While the film follows various families as they come and go from this one house, it mostly focuses on the Young family: Al and Rose (Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly), a young couple who purchase the home on the GI Bill in the days after WWII, and their oldest son Richard (Tom Hanks) and his eventual wife, Margaret (Robin Wright). We follow this family through the decades as a passive observer in their living room, attending family gatherings, witnessing tender moments, fights, momentous occasions, the ups and downs of an average life. Zemeckis also expands his view to include occupants other occupants of the home of various backgrounds, as far back as Native Americans who occupied the land long before the home was built.
The sense of boomer nostalgia that permeated Forrest Gump is very much present in Here. Seminal events unfold around them, sometimes broadcast on the radio and on television - from the American Revolution to World War II to the arrival of the Beatles, Vietnam, the Iraq War, all the way to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, this time, it somehow feels more focused, wiser, and world-weary; the work of an older, more mature artist whose career experiments with form and visual effects finally come to a breathtaking pinnacle here. This is bold, old-fashioned filmmaking, the kind that isn't afraid to wear its heart on its sleeve. As someone who doesn't particularly care for Forrest Gump despite its fairly entrenched status in American popular culture, I found Here’s warm, bittersweet melancholy to be completely irresistible.
This is Zemeckis' The Tree of Life, and that is not a comparison I make lightly (and not because this movie also features dinosaurs). Here takes one American family and places them in a kind of cosmic context, intrinsically connected with those who have come before and those who have come after, memorably referred to as "the voices who once filled this room" by a wistful Hanks giving thanks over a Thanksgiving meal. There's something delicately autumnal about what Zemeckis is doing here, reflecting not just on life but on the interconnectedness of things, using frames within frames to expand the world beyond the living room like pieces of a scrapbook, holding seemingly ephemeral memories from one era to the next. I found myself reflecting on my own family, recalling my own fond memories of faces long gone, voices now silent but whose presence nevertheless endures. It feels like the work of a filmmaker taking stock of what's important, one who refuses to be boxed in even by a single static shot, finding new ways to expand the film's scope beyond the three walls that make up the film's single location.
The result is often breathtaking, a film of unusual grace and tenderness that feels like an old dog learning new tricks. The de-aging technology fits seamlessly into the film, bringing back Big-era Hanks without distracting from the narrative. Here is both daring in its form and unabashedly sentimental, never cloying or dishonest. It’s a film of big emotions and grand gestures that takes a deceptively small-scale focus and widens it into something grand and enduring, a dazzling formal wonder that isn’t afraid to wear its heart proudly on its sleeve.
