Zemeckis, following in the footsteps of the graphic novel, plays around with time in “Here.” The movie moves back and forth through history, sometimes at once — a trick the filmmaker accomplishes by dropping little window boxes into the frame to show us an event happening at another time in the same exact spot. On several occasions, Zemeckis uses this to draw parallels to various events, and there is more than one occasion where I get the impression that he’s slyly hinting the house could even be haunted (or maybe that was my mind wandering to think about a much better movie). This setup could make for an interesting experiment — but I imagine it works better in graphic novel form than it does in film (full disclosure: I’ve never read the comic). For one thing, by locking the action in one place, Zemeckis and co-writer Eric Roth have to find excuses to have all the action rooted in one spot. This might be a suburban living room, but we see a funeral, a wedding, a birth, and even a death all in this one location. And since time is constantly moving around in the film, the script also forces characters to shout out exposition to keep the audience up to speed (“Our little girl is going to college!” a character will suddenly exclaim, only for the scene to then quickly fade and have the same character add: “I can’t believe our little girl is graduating college!”, and so on).
“Here” is sold as a big “Forrest Gump” reunion: not only is Zemeckis reuniting with that film’s screenwriter, Roth, but that movie’s stars, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, also lead “Here.” Sounds great on paper: Hanks and Wright are both excellent performers. Unfortunately, ever the magician, Zemeckis has employed the trickery of digital de-aging technology (the tech is enhanced using A.I. and seemingly created in-camera, though don’t ask me to explain how it all works). I’m not entirely against digital de-aging (as long as it’s being used on living actors, and not ghoulishly resurrecting the dead like in “Alien: Romulus”). In the right hands (see: Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman”), this process can pay off. And to be fair, the digital de-aging in “Here” doesn’t really look bad. But it doesn’t convince, either. At one point, Hanks’ character’s father, played by Paul Bettany, yells, “You’re only 18!”, and the illusion shatters, because we instinctively know that Tom Hanks is definitely not 18, no matter how digitally smooth his face may look.
Hanks plays Richard, a guy who dreams of being an artist. Richard lives in a house with his parents, Al (Bettany) and Rose (Kelly Reilly), who bought the house just after World War II (Richard also has some siblings, but they’re barely characters here). One day, teenage Richard brings his girlfriend Margaret (Wright) to visit, and she seemingly never leaves. After a night of hanky-panky on the living room couch, Margaret gets pregnant. Since they’re both still young, Richard and Margaret live with Richard’s parents while the baby is born — and they keep living there long after. These kids get married (right in the living room), and Margaret understandably dreams of having a house of their own. But Richard, who is prone to worrying and loves to talk about how high taxes are, shrugs his wife’s wishes off. They can’t afford it! Why not keep living rent free with mom and dad? And so the years tick on, and time passes — a fact that the characters flat-out proclaim in dialogue over and over again, in case it wasn’t clear enough (“Time sure does fly!”).
