"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Here

Hey guys, it’s me, member of a small club of people who enjoy post-2000 Robert Zemeckis, the guy who has gotten carried away with digital technology and always finds something weird to do with it, whether or not it works, and whether or not society approves (which it usually does not). HERE is a movie that would only, maybe could only be made by that person. And that’s what I want to see out of art.

The bigger selling point, to the extent that any effort was made to sell it when it came out last year, is that it’s a FORREST GUMP reunion. It stars Tom Hanks (THE LADYKILLERS) and Robin Wright (HOLLYWOOD VICE SQUAD) and he wrote the screenplay with Eric Roth (YEAR OF THE DRAGON) and obviously the score is by Alan Silvestri (THE DELTA FORCE). Like FORREST GUMP it tells a story that seems to be about American culture at large, because it takes place over a stretch of years with many emblematic incidents touching on moments in history and representing societal changes. But it does this with a very particular gimmick, taken directly from the graphic novel of the same name by Richard McGuire: it’s told from one static camera shot. It spans from the time of dinosaurs to the present, but the camera just sits there in the same spot the whole time.

(Actually, at times it kinda reminded me of ADULT SWIM YULE LOG.)

For a tiny slice of that period, but most of the movie, there’s a house there, so we’re in a living room, with a window looking out. Hanks plays Richard Young from his teenage years on, so a few scenes use the latest in de-aging technology. It’s technically generative a.i., and from what I understand it involves scanning images of Hanks from throughout his life and using those to create a younger version of him in real time as he does motion capture. If that’s correct I don’t think it qualifies for my usual ethical objections to a.i., but I still don’t like it, because I just don’t think it looks as natural as other de-aging I’ve seen, such as in INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY. If that involved painstaking frame-by-frame touch-ups, that might explain the difference.

Wright also appears to age while playing his girlfriend Margaret, who then becomes his wife, and eventually his ex-wife. Some of their marital conflict comes from sharing the house with Richard’s parents Al (Paul Bettany, PRIEST) and Rose (Kelly Reilly, FLIGHT). Margaret wants out of there, but for years they have a hard time affording it, then Al decides to give them the house. An act of kindness that is also incredibly stifling.

It was obvious from the trailer that there was gonna be a big emotional trigger for me involving dementia. The portrayal alternates between very familiar to my experiences and not believable to me, but of course there’s a dramatic logic to bringing the loss of memory into this story about all the things that happen in one place, many remembered, more forgotten. Yeah, this one’s definitely a crier, but for me it was overwhelming for reasons other than any other specific tragedy. The depictions of families going through different things in different time periods just got me thinking of family members I’ve lost. It kind of has the feeling of looking through an old photo album, seeing the same people at different Christmases, the hair and the sweaters and the furniture changing.

We see some real arcs, like Al evolving from a bitter, alcoholic asshole after the war to a softened, kinder person after suffering loss and illness and being forced to depend on his son. But since we’re crossing oceans of time with a bunch of different families, many of the most monumental events of their lives come at us rapid fire. In one sense that dilutes the impact of these moments, but it also creates a cumulative effect of seeing so many of the things that everyone deals with, one after another. It feels kinda like becoming a cosmic being, taking a step back and getting a look at humanity from outside of time.

I was aware of the format going in, but not entirely. What makes this especially interesting is that it’s not linear. We see dinosaurs, the ice age, the life of a Native American couple before the place was colonized, the building of the house across the street, the building of the house Richard will live in, families that lived there before and after him, but not always in order. The scenes dance around between different years, sometimes using inset panels to show different portions of the space at different times, all at once. This draws comparisons and contrasts between the eras – we experience the Spanish flu, and then it’s much later and people are wearing masks and we realize it’s COVID-19. We see Richard dressed as Benjamin Franklin at a Halloween party, and we see the actual Benjamin Franklin (Keith Bartlett, PREY FOR THE DEVIL) when his son William (Daniel Betts, ALLIED) owns the fancy-ass estate across the street.

My favorite inhabitants of this house are pinup model Stella Beakman (Ophelia Lovibond, ROCKETMAN) and her husband Leo (David Fynn, LEAP YEAR), who invents what becomes the La-Z Boy chair (you know how Zemeckis loves fictionalizing who invented things). They own the house in the ‘40s before the Youngs, and they just seem like fun, quirky people, and Stella likes to put on a record and dance around while she vacuums. So it’s kind of deep when an inset panel fast forwards to 2020 and there’s a Rumba cleaning that room. That family also has a maid (Anya Marco Harris), but my guess is that neither of those luxuries would make Stella’s life better. She’s having so much fun vacuuming!

Of course there’s a certain amount of “American Dream” exploration here, with different classes finding different ways to afford home ownership in this choice spot with a window faced directly at the estate of the son of a Founding Father. The entrepreneur who moves away to California making room for the WWII veteran, whose son works hard and follows the rules but can’t seem to fucking afford his own place. It never deals directly with racism, but there appeared to be a few Black slaves present during construction of the Franklin estate, and generations later a Black family, the Harrises (Nicholas Pinnock, Nikki Amuka-Bird and Cache Venderpuye), finally own the house. I think they made the place look the nicest, but also I noticed that they got the fuck out of there faster than any other family.

Original author McGuire first used the idea in a six page comic published in Art Spiegelman’s Raw magazine in 1989. It is considered a groundbreaking use of the medium and influential to the work of other cartoonists, including Chris Ware. In 2014 McGuire reinvented it as a 300-page, full color book. The book also includes some panels of “projected futures and species,” but Zemeckis decided against that (though my friend Matt Lynch found a clip where the house is destroyed in a tsunami).

Unsurprisingly, Zemeckis came up with other ways to play around with this set up. We see Al with his movie camera at Christmas, then years later we see him showing home movies to the grandkids and we revisit that scene from a camera angle other than this one we’ve been stuck on. There’s a thrilling moment late in the movie when a dresser with a mirror attached is carried through and we see in the reflection that holy shit, the kitchen is over there. Okay, the place where Al always had a drink seemed kind of weird like he was just facing a wall, but now that I see the rest of the room it seems a little more sensible.

One complaint: in the later years we see the house stripped, with some wires coming out of a hole in the wall, and I thought, “Man, it’s gonna be exciting when that cable gets hooked up,” but we never do see that. I suppose there wasn’t enough time in between the more consequential events. There’s an extinction, a conception, a birth, a couple deaths, a couple weddings, a couple funerals that all happen on this spot (which does feel like a stretch sometimes). For me the biggest weakness is a side effect of the premise. In order to keep Richard in the picture for a long time the story has to make him pretty pathetic. It’s just depressing that he spends most of his life living in this one house, especially since our view of it is this one room. A major milestone in his marriage is when he concedes to Margaret’s demand to buy a nicer couch for them to live on in his parents’ house. And he’s still in that damn place when she leaves him.

I know there are different interpretations of what Zemeckis’ world view is, especially in regards to FORREST GUMP, but I don’t think this reflects the listen to your mama, follow the rules kind of values some people attribute to that. Looking back later on, Richard sees that his biggest mistake was abandoning painting when he took on a bank job to be a responsible husband and father. He only becomes happy when he’s free of his family and dedicated to art projects. And though he and Margaret never stop loving each other, it’s portrayed as a natural and good thing that they grow apart and decide to split up. It seems to improve them both as people. And then thank God they get out of that fucking house. It’s gotta be haunted at this point.

I wouldn’t rank HERE very high in the Zemeckisography, but I think it’s an interesting movie. There’s probly a limit to how good a story can be within the framework of this gimmick, but they ended up on the higher end (says me – most critics disagree, calling it cloying bullshit). It was an idea worth trying for the one guy who would try it. Keep ‘em coming, Bobby Z.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 4th, 2025 at 7:18 am and is filed under Reviews, Drama. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

12 Responses to “Here”

  1. The one thing that was really bothering me since I saw the first trailer was: “Isn’t this just the Casey Affleck is a ghost movie?”

    The movie comes out, the vast majority of reviews call it cloying bullshit. And still I’m left with the feeling like ‘I just saw this movie, but I seem to be the only one’.

    FINALLY, after reading like 50 reviews, someone says ‘this movie is cloying bullshit, and it rips off the Casey Affleck is a ghost movie*’, and I feel like I can move forward.

    *in all fairness, while this review was tearing the movie to shreds, I felt calling it a ‘rip-off’ was maybe a little much. It’s very possible the people behind ghostly Casey read the same graphic novel and ripped that off to avoid paying for rights, while Zemeckis chose the more honorable path.

  2. The “Casey Affleck is a ghost movie” ripped off the graphic novel, which predates it by several years.

  3. The “Casey Affleck is a ghost movie” ripped off the graphic novel, which predates it by several years.

    Oh geez, look at the egg on my face. Thank you for clearing that up.

    (I know my first comment shows I already wrote that, and you just didn’t read it, but I’m a ghost who moves through time)

  4. I thought this was abysmal. The conceit of not moving the camera could have been really interesting, I think, but they didn’t really do much with it. You only really want to do something like that to showcase the differences between times (both similarities and stark dichotomies), the this-then-that cause-and-effect of things, and general aesthetic “comparisons” that speak to underlying themes and the like. And they don’t really do any of that! The different stories all exist in their own universes, and don’t really communicate with each other in an interesting way. And the stories themselves are so dry of all personality or uniqueness to them; I thought it was just tropes we’ve all seen (the black family talking about getting pulled over; the artist who sacrifices his art to make money; the wife who feels trapped; living through your kids). I thought the characters were broadly defined and worse-written than even their bio’s would indicate.

    The one time I thought “This is something…” is when the wife tells a bad joke and the neighbor has a heart attack and dies. It’s such a strange, darkly funny moment that I found really stuck a pin in something. But they don’t ever really do stuff like that before or again.

  5. @jojo, I read your entire comment and was confirming your astericized speculation.

  6. I’m kinda halfway between the conventional wisdom on robert zemeckis and verns view.

    I don’t think his movies are generally that good, but I do love how insane they are. So I’m deffintly down to watch this but probably as a “Oh this is on netflix and I’m home with nothing to do” movie not a seeking it out to watch it.

  7. (six page, not six panel. feel free to delete this minor probably-a-brain-typo correction!)

  8. Whoops. Thank you, Kit.

  9. I just want to go on the record saying that for all this film’s problems –and it has a lot of extremely serious problems, some of them downright catastrophic– I also found it profoundly moving. I don’t think one single thing outside the Hanks/Wright scenes really works (the Laz-E-Boy plot is probably the only one that really rises to “tolerable,” and that’s basically a throwaway joke) but man, maybe it’s just me tipping decisively into middle age, but their whole saga really hit me hard. You rarely see this level of unapologetic Hollywood artifice brought to bear on material this mundane, let alone material this…ambivalent, at least, if not downright despairing. Its narrative is both “small” –it is, fundamentally, a little domestic slice of life– and epic in scale, spanning Hanks’ entire life, from birth to old age. And the real stunner is that for all the movie’s ham-handedness, the portrait that emerges is anything but simple. As much as I don’t think the other timelines work even a little on their own, the way they place this tiny, downright banal little life story of these two people inextricably into a direct line that goes back to the dinosaurs feels radical and powerful, a vision of time itself as both terrifying and unifying: a death sentence for all our dreams and hopes and cares and eventually our very lives which is also existentially comforting in that it’s an experience universally shared by every other living thing that has ever existed, and, in fact, is the magic ingredient that lets us impose narrative and therefore meaning on a string of random and otherwise unconnected moments.

    Also legit one of the most formally experimental mainstream movies in years. Yeah, it would be nice if it wasn’t so corny and ham-handed and relentlessly on-the-nose (Robin Wright basically turning directly to the camera to announce what her final subplot will be), but I think it also might be some kind of crazy masterpiece, and masterpieces are not dismissed lightly just because they incidentally happens to sometimes be terrible and embarrassing.

    (my full thoughts)

  10. “they place this tiny, downright banal little life story of these two people inextricably into a direct line that goes back to the dinosaurs feels radical and powerful, a vision of time itself as both terrifying and unifying: a death sentence for all our dreams and hopes and cares and eventually our very lives which is also existentially comforting in that it’s an experience universally shared by every other living thing that has ever existed, and, in fact, is the magic ingredient that lets us impose narrative and therefore meaning on a string of random and otherwise unconnected moments.”

    Sounds like Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life”.

  11. For a movie that a lot of critics etc. have already forgot or outright wrote-off from almost it’s first showing I find myself thinking a lot about it, or at least having thoughts derived from it. To whit –

    I was immediately struck by the passage of time from the fact that in 2024 I was sitting in a theatre watching a movie starring Tom Hanks, directed by Robert Zemeckis (with both their past filmography’s) and it was a matinee on the first Saturday it was released and there we’re maybe 5 people in the theatre, time passes, because it seems like only a short time ago the theatre would have been packed.

    I’ve always been interested in Zemeckis as a filmmaker – he seems to occupy a weird region combining some intangible mix of showmanship, real talented craftsman, perhaps a large dose of nerdy obsession with new gadgetry/technology and a bit of pseudo intellectual philosophy. While I definitely think that his very best filmmaking is long in the past (another passage of time analogy, I get it,) I would rate 2012’s FLIGHT his last largely successful movie (and maybe his most conventional.) If I had to rank my favourites/his best, I’d go:

    1. Back to the Future Part 2
    2. Who Framed Roger Rabbit
    3. Contact
    4. Cast Away
    5. Back to the Future Part 1

    It’s also interesting how so many of his movies really have as an integral component – time itself. From time travel, to the deep passage of time and space, to the giant leap of time in a life lived etc. Vern highlights the similarities in structure between HERE and FORREST GUMP. From a cinematic standpoint I’ve always thought his transition covering 4 years in CAST AWAY, the transition from the fire burning in the cave to the speared fish is one of the most striking cuts in film.

    I’ve always given Zemeckis credit for ambition – failed/successful/misplaced/misbegotten, but ambitious nonetheless. That cut in CAST AWAY described above is not as great or a successful as the million year jump in @))! from bone to space station, but man Zemeckis is certainly ambitious in at least trying it.

    If anyone is interested, the original RAW comics short story was adapted into a 6 minute student film, it’s on YouTube:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57hR44mB5u0

    I just watched Chantal Ackerman’s JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES (it’s 50th anniversary is this year) and NEWS FROM HOME (my personal favourite of hers.) She’s another filmmaker who has a very stark interest in time itself, as an almost intrinsic, central aspect of film itself. Ackerman came to believe that “time {is} the most important thing in film.” She studied under the Canadian Avantgarde filmmaker Richard Snow – his most important films were WAVELENGTH and LA REGION CENTRALE. WAVELENGTH is a 45 minute film featuring a stationary camera that begins on a wide-angle shot of an apartment wall and then zooms in, very little, but also quite a lot happens. LA REGION CENTRALE is a 3 hour film made up of 17? shots of a mountain range over an extended season.

    JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES is of course famous for being composed of mostly very long takes from a locked camera as he observe a woman going about what appear to be the humdrum/banal everyday tasks of an ordinary day, but of course this contemplative/languid story allows us to reflect individually on her life.

    I found it interesting that HERE got me thinking about not only time, the passage of time and time as used as a storytelling technique/symbol/motif – but on these other movies – I wonder if Zemeckis has seen any of these other films and what he thinks of them?

    HERE was like something Vern said at the start of his review – “And that’s what I want to see out of art.” A lot of the time I think that is the whole point of art – not to like it, or dislike it, but to get you thinking.

    Ultimately HERE might be the Zemeckis movie that gets the biggest reevaluation/reconsideration down the road, I think.

    I liked it.

  12. My wife & I got married last April, bought a house in November and watched this on VOD at home in December. We cried like babies throughout. Please have mercy on us, we’re only human. It’s a flawed film for sure but also fascinating. I am usually open to this sort heart-on-it’s-sleeve sincerity anyway and if that isn’t your mode, this definitely won’t be for you. But I found it a little cheesy, sure, but ultimately profound even with those caveats.

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