Josh Reviews Here

Here is directed by Robert Zemeckis, reuniting with his Forrest Gump stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright.  The entire film takes place in a single room in a house in suburban New Jersey, and we move backwards and forwards through time, following the lives and struggles of the different families who lived there.  While we see several different families, the film focuses on the multi-generational Young family: the WWII veteran Al (Paul Bettany) and his wife Rose (Kelly Reilly) and their son Richard (Tom Hanks), who eventually lives there with his wife Margaret (Robin Wright) and their daughter Vanessa (played by various actresses as she ages).  The film is based on the beautiful graphic novel by Richard McGuire (which is definitely worth reading — it’s a wonderfully creative and experimental piece of work).

Here received poor reviews and quickly came and went from theaters when it was released in November.  While the film is flawed, I thoroughly enjoyed watching it, and I think it’s a far stronger film than the reviews would have you believe.

When the film works, it’s a beautiful and heartbreaking encapsulation of how quickly human beings’ lives come and go, and the preciousness of the moments we have together.  I found myself moved by several scenes late in the film, as the accumulation of moments I’d witnessed coalesced into a powerful and surprising feeling of melancholy.

The film is also interesting as a bold narrative experiment and visual effects exercise.  Mr. Zemeckis bravely stuck to the conceit of the original graphic novel, in that we basically have a static camera with an unchanging viewpoint on this one single room in space.  He also stuck to the graphic novel’s playfulness with time.  The story doesn’t progress linearly.  Yes, there is a basic forward thrust as we watch the Young family move through the decades, but as that story is being told, we also drift backwards and forwards through the years, weaving in and out of the lives of several different families.  This might have been confusing, but I loved the dream-like, “tone poem” feel this structure gave to the story, and I didn’t have trouble keeping track of who was who and where in time we were.  (Bravo to editor Jesse Goldsmith.)

This is a very human-scale story, but nevertheless there are a lot of visual effects on display in this film.  Mr,. Zemeckis and his team convincingly recreate this room and this house across multiple generations, and the actors play their characters from youth to old age, with AI-assisted aging and de-aging processes deployed to create the illusion and enhance the performances of the actors.  It’s all pretty seamlessly done.  Yes, there is an artificiality to what we’re seeing on screen — how could there not be, when we all know that, for instance, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright are no longer in their thirties?!  But it worked for me!  I found the aging and de-aging to be convincing enough that I wasn’t distracted from the story.  (Click here to learn lots more about the visual effects process used in the creation of this film.)

The original graphic novel is mostly a visual experience.  There’s some dialogue and hints at the outlines of character arcs, but the main leap to adapting this into a feature film was to develop and expand the stories and characters we’d be following through the tale.  This is probably the film’s biggest weakness, as I felt the script, by Mr. Zemeckis and Eric Roth, wasn’t everything I’d hoped it would be.  (This is a surprise, as Eric Roth has written a number of fantastic movies — including The Insider, Munich, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Killers of the Flower Moon, and Dune — and has been nominated for an Academy Award for screenwriting six times.)   But I felt the script to Here was a little flat.  There were a number of scenes that felt stilted and awkward to me.  Some of this could be blamed on the actors and/or the direction, but I definitely feel this would have been a stronger movie had there been more snappy and engaging dialogue in the various vignettes we were seeing from these people’s lives.  Also, the film gets a little too schmaltzy in the third act in a way I found somewhat off-putting.

Tom Hanks is one of the great actors of this generation, and he does strong work playing Richard Young from his twenties into his old age.  It’s a delight to see Mr. Hanks once again paired with Robin Wright, who matches him well as they move through the decades with these characters.  I wish we’d gotten to know Richard’s parents Al and Rose a little better.  The film keeps those characters at a bit of a distance from the audience, though Paul Bettany (Vision in the MCU, most recently seen in WandaVision) and Kelly Reilly (Mary Morstan/Watson in Guy Ritchie’s two Sherlock Holmes films) do a good job showing the journey through aging their characters take.

My favorite couple in the film were the bohemian pairing of inventor Leo (David Fryn) and the vivacious, dancing-while-she-vacuums Stella (Ophelia Lovibond).  I loved those two, and I’m glad they got a happy ending!

I loved the way the film’s opening sequence beautifully captured the frames/panels effect from the graphic novel, allowing us to see images from different time-periods on screen at the same time.  I’m glad that effect carried through as the film proceeded.

I was wondering whether the graphic novel’s more outlandish time-jumps would be brought into the film.  I’d assumed they wouldn’t be, but nope, we did indeed get dinosaurs and Native Americans!  That was a fun surprise to me!  I wonder if that was a bit much for some audiences, but I liked this narrative playfulness.  (Though seeing the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs was one step too far to me.  That asteroid didn’t really crash in New Jersey, did it??)

Alan Silvestri (Mr. Zemeckis’ frequent collaborator — his score for Back to the Future is one of the all-time best movie scores) contributes a beautiful score.  That score has a lot of heavy lifting to do in the film, to carry us emotionally through the various scenes in different time-periods, and I think the score does that job well.  (Though I do wish the main theme had been slightly more memorable.  This feels like a score that wanted/needed to implant itself a little more firmly in the viewer’s head.)

The film tries to end on an up-note with its final scene, though I was surprised by the degree to which its general tone is one of loss and regret.  I’d expecting the film to build to a sense of love and happiness in this house and the one room we’ve been watching over the years/decades/centuries, but that’s not exactly what happens.  I left the film feeling more disheartened than I’d expected.  (But that’s not a complaint!)  Yes, this film was schmaltzy, but I did get emotional at the way the film captured the brevity of a human lifetime.  I found this to be quite affecting.

Robert Zemeckis has directed many of my all-time favorite films (the Back to the Future trilogy, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Contact), and while I’ve found his work to have been inconsistent ever since the aughts, I think Here is an interesting and moving film that is worth your consideration.  It’s imperfect, but it’s a fascinating experiment, and I’m glad to have seen it.

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