Long before Rose (Kelly Reilly) and Al Young (Paul Bettany) moved into their New England home, it belonged to inventor couple Lee (David Fynn) and Stella Beekman (Ophelia Lovibond).  Before them, private aviator John (Gwilym Lee) and his wife, Pauline Marter (Michelle Dockery).  Across the street is a colonial estate originally belonging to John Franklin (Daniel Betts), the illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin (Keith Bartlett).  Before them, the land was inhabited by an Indigenous couple (Joel Oulette, Dannie McCallum), and before them, it was a vast wilderness.  On this land that has seen love and loss, Richard (Tom Hanks) and Margaret (Robin Wright) will raise a family of their own, and after them, Devon (Nicholas Pinnock) and Helen (Nikki Amuka-Bird) will navigate the tumultuous 2020 with their son, Justin (Cache Vanderpuye), in this house with the big bay window which they call home. 

Robert Zemeckis delivers Here for Sony Pictures, a grand reunion of the Forrest Gump (1994) dream team, both in front of and behind the camera.  Eric Roth delivers the script, Don Burgess manages the camera, Alan Silvestri composes a music-box score, and Joanna Johnston dresses the actors across this millennium-spanning drama.  Running a mere 104 minutes and stretching its single-setup conceit to the absolute limits – a remnant of its origins as a graphic novel by Richard McGuire – it does not take audiences long to fall into the rhythm of the pacing and assemble this constantly in-flux collage of images and moments – memories – into a full and uniformed story. 

Historically, Zemeckis is a director who has always been fascinated by technology and an early adopter if not a downright pioneer; see, Who Framed Roger Rabit (1988) and The Polar Express (2004) to name some of his most audacious swings.  As is true in real life, sometimes pioneers are overambitious and may be steered drastically off course.  In Here, the tech-inclined directed utilizes a new de-aging technology, Metaphysic Live, that essentially does the de-aging in camera as opposed to The Irishman (2019) which also utilized AI to assist in its extensive de-aging, but done in postproduction.  The results are jarring, possibly even more so than in Martin Scorsese’s mid-Atlantic crime thriller, because even though it is akin to using digital makeup – an excuse that admittedly holds a little less weight in this case than it did in the prior – by painting over the actors, their new “digital avatars” do not feel like an organic part of the image on screen.  When Hanks comes bounding into the living room for the first time, we can believe enough in the magic of the movies that he maybe is college-aged, but soon we learn that Richard is supposed to still be in high school when he introduces Margaret to his parents, the illusion is lost.  This effect is further tested as characters come close to Burgess’ unmoving lens, framed in a tight bust shot, center center, creating the unintended experience of watching a scene clearly blocked for the subset of audiences splurging on a RealD ticket but projected in 2D.  Beyond the nonlinear structure – which does work quite well in this film – and the challenging blocking, these visual hurdles create just another barrier of entry for audiences. 

For audiences that stick with Zemeckis through his latest experiment, the majority of the film follows Al and Rose purchasing the home with assistance from the GI Bill and raising a family.  This story works in tandem with Robert and Margaret’s story as Robert, the oldest son and struggling artist turned insurance salesman, never quite finds the right time to move into a home of their own always citing taxes or insurance rates.  A shotgun wedding, it is not long until Vanessa (Zsa Zsa Zemeckis) joins the family adding yet another bustling body to the tight, unmoving lens.  Zemeckis treats this narrative with all the gravitas of a modern American, middle-class epic, and though the kaleidoscopic structure does take some time to acclimate to, it is far more effective than had this story been distilled linearly.  The core cast all deliver solid performances, and for the most part the timbre of the voice which does not seem to be covered over in digital artifice, helps to bring credence to this centuries-spanning tale, and we do find ourselves caught up in the whirlwind of their everyday lives.   

Slowly, we begin noticing patterns of behavior in these characters as if we were growing up with them and realizing that their quirks may be masks for more serious problems.  Al’s alcoholism is the major one that, if these stories held more weight could be said frames the narrative, but it is more just breadcrumbs to show us the progression of time.  The other major trial for the Young family is Margaret’s early signs of dementia.  It is, unfortunately, so heavily telegraphed that we are left just waiting for it to intensify and, like many of the threads, is not deeply interrogated.  Despite the wide ensemble cast, this film is far and away Hanks’ show, and because of that none of these other members are deeply explored, and even Robert himself is rather thinly built when the film is reconciled with as the credits roll.   

The surrounding stories do add some texture and flavor to the story as well as pad out the runtime from what would have been a more traditional, 80-90 minute family drama.  Unfortunately, the script does not expand on these other stories or weave them into the main action in any interesting way.  It is set up similarly to Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play Arcadia in which two related dramas play out, one in 1809 and the other in the present, in the same garden estate house, separated by centuries but united on stage.  Here brushes up against some overlap in these stories when an excavation team discovers the funeral necklace of the indigenous woman in the Young’s backyard, but beyond taking place in the same small corner of the universe, these stories remain shockingly independent of each other.  Too much crossover could have come off rather hokey, but a little more emphasis on how these stories affect each other would have added a more sustainable element to the story. 

Here is seeking to do too much with too little, and then delivering too little of what it is trying to do. Those who are looking for a deep-rooted narrative will be scorned by watching these caricatures and archetypes bump into each other but strangely enough, Zemeckis keeps the emotional heart of the story pumping strongly as ever behind the scenes.  To be disingenuous, the film is dripping with the sickeningly sweet saccharinity that has become somewhat emblematic of Zemeckis’ entire career and especially these later works.  It is a tone, however, that is pretty early established as Burgess’ lens, either by creative intention or technological necessity, filters all the events through a rose-colored glass.  The relentlessness of this pleasant enough palate against Silvestri’s pleasant enough score, and as these characters engage in Roth’s pleasant enough dialogue is enough to disarm audiences, and while the sentimentality is overworked to the point of feeling like it was manufactured, Zemeckis still treats it as wholly genuine and organic that even against our preconceived apprehensions, we cannot help but get swept up in the everyday trials and tribulations of this nuclear family; a strange thing to say in the wildly radicalized world we actually live in today.