Almost 50 years into a career enriched and enlivened by restless motion, Robert Zemeckis tries his hand at total stasis with his latest film Here. An incredibly literal interpretation of the term “chamber drama,” the film’s perspective is tied to a fixed point in space that, for most of the runtime, is occupied by the living room of a suburban home. Though the patch of land it rests upon, in what is now called New England, undergoes seismic changes throughout history — all the while reflecting the shifting cultural attitudes that reshape it — there are some things that stay the same. Love brings us together, but it also drives us toward conflict. Commitment can be synonymous with compromise. Tradition can be a roadmap and a boobytrap. Time is indifferent to our suffering and sacrifices. These are some of the anxieties that drift through the camera’s field of vision, incrementally articulated through accumulation, repetition, and variation. Though the quaint and quiet story that takes shape never quite reaches the heights of emotion Zemeckis has proved himself capable of engineering, Here is a rich and bizarre experiment in largeness writ small.
The opening passages, via a fractured chronology, piece together the violent journey from wilderness to domesticity. The land is twice paved over — first by the Chicxulub impact, second by offscreen forces of colonization — and eventually a house is erected, enclosing the camera and limiting our view of the outside world to the window that faces the street. Families come, stay for a while, and move on. Couples in the 1900s and 1940s are supplanted after WWII by Al (Paul Bettany) and Rose (Kelly Reilly), who will remain long enough to pass the baton to their son Richard (Tom Hanks) and his wife Margaret (Robin Wright). “I could spend the rest of my life here,” says Margaret on one of their first dates, but surrounding scenes of a Black family moving in at the onset of COVID, of Indigenous lovers in pre-colonial times starting a family in the undergrowth, and of an elderly Richard eventually returning to the empty house, cast her words in a different light. Each successive frame lends its neighbors a sense of impermanence; all of the film’s emotional highs are assigned an expiry date by those past and yet to come.
As Here jumps seemingly at random between these points in time, the experiences of the space’s various occupants are sutured together by points of visual overlap. The image overlays — which either slide, expand, or fade away — are carried over from its source material; though the stillness of view and movement of subjects unmistakably evokes the experience of live theater, Here is actually based on Richard McGuire’s graphic novel of the same name. Zemeckis deploys these panels like a rectangular iris, using them to focus, refine, and expand our point of view. It’s a remarkable technique that braids formal traditions from three different mediums into one uniform aesthetic, and lends a sense of experiential flow to the film’s narrative sprawl.
Zemeckis’ technical savvy and puckish persona — which animate even his most sentimental works — have always brought to mind mad mechanics like Back to the Future’s Doc Brown. His films are composed of countless moving parts, their narrative and stylistic acts of plate-spinning pulling double-duty as rotating cogs in well-oiled machines. While Here’s approach to movement is, by necessity, more limited, its style and structure are just as intricate as the entertainment delivery systems that made its director a household name. Though its gimmick lends a thematic urgency to every scene, the onus of communication now falls primarily on the screenplay, which Zemeckis co-wrote with Forrest Gump scribe Eric Roth.
Here’s marketing leans heavily on the reunion of Gump’s team; Hanks and Wright reunite to play a couple (de- and re-aged with AI) who gradually lose sight of all their hopes, dreams, aspirations, and affections as they perpetually postpone their movement away from Richard’s stifling childhood home. The film is only Gumpian in its placement of figures against historical and iconographical backdrops of aging Americana, though Zemeckis continues to fuse emotional beats with irony and slapstick. Here is rife with tonal incongruities, its staging of familial niceties running the gamut from hushed sincerity to evident strain. And elsewhere, the ‘40s-set scenes observe the inventor of the La-Z-Boy chair and the woman he loves to engage in knowing, a playful pantomime of their socially-expected roles, a game that finds contrast and compliment in their sexual frankness.
The film’s suggestion of domesticity as a performance that can all-too-easily become a prison gives Richard and Margaret’s story an urgency that’s more conceptual than emotional. The predetermination of the schism in their marriage is the film’s whisper-shouted subtext, reflected back on them by the architecture of the room that comes to define their lives. When characters leave the frame, it’s not always clear whether it’s an escape or a death sentence; in this sense, the camera’s pattern-breaking solution to Richard and Margaret’s existential problem is ravishing, disquieting, and dissatisfying all at once. Drudgery is eclipsed by the powers of memory and rupture, but like so many of Here’s most tender moments, it comes too late — time marches on, and this time, the camera goes with it.
Suspended as always at a majestic midpoint between the mocking and the maudlin, the artifice of Zemeckis’ craft is the ideal match for the conceptual force of this story’s tangle of symbols and ciphers. All that said — though the math may add up differently for every viewer (or even every viewing) — as a movie considered in totality, it’s still tough to shake the feeling that Here is still somehow something less than the sum of its playful, provocative parts.
DIRECTOR: Robert Zemeckis; CAST: Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Paul Bettany, Kelly Reilly; DISTRIBUTOR: TriStar Pictures/Sony; IN THEATERS: November 1; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 44 min.
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