This image released by Sony Pictures Entertainment shows Tom Hanks, left, and Robin Wright in a scene from 'Here.'The Associated Press
Here
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
Written by Robert Zemeckis, Eric Roth
Starring Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Paul Bettany, Kelly Reilly
Classification PG-13; 104 minutes
Robert Zemeckis seems to be getting sentimental in his old age.
I know. I know. We’re talking about the guy who made Forrest Gump, the Oscar-winner that got audiences and Academy voters all choked up over a box of chocolates. So, sentimental is nothing new for Zemeckis. But it’s impossible not to look at Here – an ornamental but occasionally amusing and even moving film about time slipping away – and sense that he’s getting at least a bit retrospective.
In Here, Zemeckis marries time travelling elements from his most beloved movie, Back To The Future, to the cloying affectations of Forrest Gump, a portrait of life lived at its sweetest. He’s also reunited with key players from the latter movie: writer Eric Roth and stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright are all on deck. And Hanks is even playing a conduit of sorts for Zemeckis.
Like the director, Hanks’s Richard is a baby boomer from a working-class family. And, as the director has said in interviews, his own parents – like Richard’s – embalmed precious family memories such as birthdays and holidays on 8 mm. Also like Zemeckis, Richard is an artist – a painter to be specific – though his creative ambitions largely go unrealized. The life Richard and his wife Margaret (Wright) live is commonplace. The way Zemeckis tells it is anything but.
There’s already been a lot of online fuss over Here’s AI-enhanced de-aging process, in which we see Hanks, playing a younger Richard, looking like he did in his Big-era. That Zemeckis would lean into this kind of AI technology is no surprise. He’s been at the forefront in rendering uncanny versions of his actors for animated films such as A Christmas Carol or The Polar Express (which also starred Hanks). The Dorian Gray effect is right in his wheelhouse. But that doesn’t save his actors from appearing uncomfortable in their digital skin. It lends an artificiality to their performances. And that artificiality bleeds across a movie where entire lives – the highs and lows – are written in shorthand.
Here adapts Richard McGuire’s graphic novel, which plays with its comic strip panels to break up a single space across time, from the prehistoric to now. Zemeckis matches that formal conceit. Almost his entire movie is framed from a single position, looking out into the humble living room where Richard and Margaret will try and contain all their precious memories: sex, birth and death included. Their story unfolds like we’re flipping through a chaotically arranged photo album – cellophane covers and all – the camera’s stillness being the only constant during dramatic time shifts.
The movie isn’t just zigzagging across Richard and Margaret’s story but all time, persistently retreating to get glimpses at the other lives lived in that space: chiefly Richard’s parents (played by Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly) when they were just starting their family, but also the African-American family who will eventually move into their home, the dinosaurs who would have trod across the space where their living room goes, the red coat holding a grudge against Benjamin Franklin while living in the colonial manor across the street, and the bohemian couple who would invent an early version of the La-Z-Boy. Zemeckis and Roth fudge fact to make some of these decorative side characters history adjacent – a bit like they did with Forrest Gump, who somehow managed to rub shoulders with Elvis, JFK and John Lennon.
Instead of substance or some metaphysical profundity, Zemeckis and Roth only find amusement in the book’s gimmick. Scenes lean hard on marking time (remember the Jane Fonda workout videos!), universal appeal (the chaos of taking a family portrait for Christmas) or Dr. Seuss-grade visual rhymes, as when a leaking roof gives way to Margaret’s water breaking, her labour then matched with an Indigenous woman giving birth centuries before. It’s all mostly cute, disposable and occasionally queasy (as some fraught histories appear here as decorative touches of white guilt).
There are melancholic bits later in the film that work – and reward anyone who sticks by the whimsical “time flies” structure – in particular when Hanks and Wright get to act (and appear) their own age, and grapple with the way time and relationships fade. In those moments, the artificiality slips away, and the movie comes by its sentimentality honestly.