Director Robert Zemeckis is someone I wonder about. There was a time when he was a popular director of popular movies. There was the Back to the Future trilogy, Forrest Gump, Cast Away, and a host of others. But then he started doing animated features where he used motion capture to get famous actors into the animated work, often with their own faces animated in to the point where I started to wonder why bother making the movie animated at all. By the time Welcome to Marwen came out, I had pretty much decided that the guy had lost his step by going off into really bizarre directions. That said, I remember vaguely coming across the idea that Zemeckis is a guy who mostly likes working with cutting edge special effects to tell stories, and that tracks for pretty much the entirety of his career as I stopped to think about it.
That certainly explains his latest, Here, reuniting him with his Gump stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, plus that movie’s screenwriter Eric Roth, for a movie where the entire story is told from a stationary point looking at the same location over centuries.
To say there’s a plot to this movie is a bit difficult. Most of the plot, such as it is, follows the lives of the Young family, starting when World War II vet Al (Paul Bettany) and newly pregnant wife Rose (Kelly Reilly) buy the house with a nice view of an old mansion that had once belonged to William Franklin, Ben’s son, and both men make brief appearances in the movie as they ride carriages to and from the mansion. Al and Rose’s oldest son Richard (Hanks) is an aspiring painter who ends up living in the house himself with his wife Margaret (Wright), and much of the plot follows these two and the rocky lives they live as Margaret mostly wants to move out of Richard’s parents’ house while Richard worries that he’ll never be able to afford to.
That said, while the Youngs get the most attention as they all age–indeed, the movie opens and closes with an elderly Richard bringing Margaret back to their former home–but there are other plots going on that get less attention. There’s turn-of-the-century flying enthusiast John (Gwilym Lee) who just wants to fly while his wife Pauline (Michelle Dockery) is the exact opposite. Inventor Leo (David Fynn) is working on a special chair while his pin-up model wife Stella (Ophelia Lovibond) cheers him on in a more humorous, happy tale. Before the house or even the William Franklin house was built, two Native Americans (Joel Oulette and Dannie McCallum) find love and have a child of their own. And some time after Richard and Margaret move out, the African American Harris family (Nicholas Pinnock, Nikki Amuka-Bird as the parents and Cache Vanderpuye as their son) move in. Various big events pop up, sometimes in the background, to let the audience know what time period an individual scene is set in, but it’s hard to say there’s much of a plot, especially as some of these characters (the Native Americans and John and Pauline) don’t even get a lot of screen time.
I’ll give Zemeckis this much here: his experimental technique largely works. At various points throughout the movie, a box will appear in the middle of the screen showing a different time period, and the movie will often shift to that time period. Most of the special effects are as top notch as technology can get these days. I wasn’t entirely sold on some of the de-aging, but it did look better than some of the old age looks, particularly when I remember Hanks is a bit over a decade older than Bettany, who plays his father, and even moreso than Reilly as his mother. Even if the plot isn’t always linear, it often is thematically connected. For example, both Margaret and the Native woman are shown giving birth to their respective children at more or less the same time. I can’t fault Zemeckis for his ambition here with Here.
What I can fault him on is how the finished product turned out. While it is never awful, it is instead often maudlin, and when it goes for comedy, I can’t say I laughed much aside from one really good joke involving the fire department. The movie seems to find excuses to have actors speak looking off into the middle distance of the next room, not quite looking into the camera, but close to it. Plus, there’s an awful lot of shoehorning in of the movie’s title into dialogue that just feels like it is meant to be significant. Hanks and Wright do good work, but others not so much, and while I did tear up a couple times, I likewise never felt like the movie really earned those tears. Here is basically what I thought it would be: an overly sentimental movie that wants to tug heartstrings, and largely does, but I never felt much of a connection to the characters as much as I probably should have.
Grade: C
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