Courtesy TriStar Pictures
Whereas it could have been rather interesting to create a film wherein the audience observes the entirety of its happenings from a single camera angle, Forrest Gump director Robert Zemeckis squanders each and every chance to try something—anything!—risky in his new film, Here.
Zemeckis’ newest focuses on a single spot in New England where all kinds of wild stuff went down over the last few million years. The dinosaurs roamed there, as did Indigenous folks; Benjamin Franklin’s son lived across the way; then someone built a house in 1900 where various families lived over the years—including an early adopter pilot, the inventor of the La-Z-Boy and, eventually, a big ol’ family pursuing the American dream. This is where Richard (Hanks) comes in, and we follow his family from the 1940s, when patriarch Al (Paul Bettany) returns from WWII and buys the house alongside his wife Rose (Kelly Reilly). Next come holidays, births, lost dreams, Beatlemania, marriages (this is where Wright appears as Richard’s partner), loves, lives, deaths, strokes, divorce and…really just all the stuff that happens to a group of people over the decades. Interspersed throughout the movie, find vignettes of previous eras thrown in, some of which include that terrible film trope wherein someone says “No one will remember Benjamin Franklin!” and we’re all supposed to laugh because we obviously do remember him.
Here, then, amounts to little more than emotional extortion, and it certainly doesn’t validate the single angle choice. This isn’t experimental, it’s the same old shit shot in a slightly different way. Admittedly, the one angle thing doesn’t get in the way, but it also doesn’t excuse the cloyingly melodramatic music from industry vet Alan Silvestri, or the creepy way it looks when older actors like Hanks and Wright get de-aged through CGI—though maybe younger folks who don’t have a frame of reference for their earlier works might not mind.
Still, Hanks and Wright feel more like a conglomerated abstract presence than actors throughout the film. They only show real chemistry during scenes featuring arguments, and none of the other cast members fare better. Bettany’s Al, for example, feels like a cartoonish amalgamation of post-WWII dad behaviors with his shouts and alcoholism and whatnot. At least he has some dimension, however, as most of the women characters feel reduced to plot devices, sounding boards and obstacles. If this was meant to illustrate something about ingrained misogyny, it doesn’t work. None of this works. Here is too schmaltzy and cutesy and smarmy for its premise, and it begins to feel more predatory than artistic. Snoooooozers.
3
+The camera angle thing is a big swing
-Exhaustively cloying; boring characters; weird de-aging
Here
Directed by Zemeckis
With Hanks, Wright, Bettany and Reilly
Violet Crown Cinema, PG-13, 104 min.
