Patrick Mulcahy reviews “Here”
Best known for the “Back to the Future” trilogy and “Forrest Gump”, director Robert Zemeckis has been making films for over forty years. He began as a writer-director with the Beatles-era comedy, “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” (1978), co-written with Bob Gale, a film that examined America’s relationship with popular culture. His follow-up, “Used Cars” (1980) focussed on commerce, the compulsion to sell. While neither film was commercially successful, Zemeckis hit his stride as a director for hire in “Romancing the Stone” (1984), a blend of comedy and action starring Kathleen Turner as a romance author catapulted into a plot that mirrored one of her stories. By the time he made “Back to the Future’, a comedy adventure in which a young man travels back to 1955 to ensure his parents fall in love, Zemeckis” direction was more confident. He broke new ground with the live-action-animation hybrid, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit’, his collaboration with animator Richard Williams, employing a back catalogue of animated favourites for Warner Bros and other cartoons in a film noir pastiche. He continued pushing form in “Forrest Gump”, which had Tom Hanks appear alongside the late John F. Kennedy, and in a trio of films that used motion capture (a form of photo-realistic digital animation) and 3D, “The Polar Express”, “Beowulf” and “A Christmas Carol”. Yet the more Zemeckis used technology, the more he lost his popular touch. Form eclipsed content, while filmmakers with more ambition like Peter Jackson made better use of the technology that Zemeckis dabbled with. He staged flair set pieces in the films “Flight” and “The Walk’, the former about a pilot (Denzel Washington) on trial for negligence, the latter about a Frenchman (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) traversing the twin towers of the World Trade Centre by tightrope, but audience had progressively less of a sense of what a “Robert Zemeckis film” guaranteed. His most recent two films, “The Witches” and “Pinocchio” were barely seen in cinemas.
His new film, “Here”, adapted from the graphic novel by Richard McGuire by “Forrest Gump” screenwriter Eric Roth, sees the now seventy-three-year-old director once again experimenting with form and the limits of digital technology. Reunited with “Forrest Gump” stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, Zemeckis reinvents the single location film, which becomes the single fixed camera position film. Hanks and Wright are amongst the cast aged and de-aged digitally in a collection of scenes that takes place in the lounge of a well-appointed house, or, in some scenes, on the ground where the house is subsequently built. Where once roamed dinosaurs, now people hang drapes.
Zemeckis transitions between scenes through the use of digital windows that overlay part of the image we are watching. We are then transported back or forward in time – a Zemeckis specialty – as we glimpse another set of characters in the same space. Several narratives that take place in different eras are related concurrently. Zemeckis cuts between them. In order for us to follow the action more easily, his storytelling is broad rather than subtle. Essentially, he tells a quintessentially American saga about hope, ingenuity, adventure, commercialism, compromise and disappointment.
The effect is to turn a photographic album into a movie to show us moments that resonate. In a homage to Zemeckis” first film, we see the Beatles on television watched in the front room of Richard (Hanks) and Margaret (Wright). Except it isn’t their front room. The house belongs to Richard’s parents (Paul Bettany, Keilly Reilly) and the young couple don’t have enough money to move. Richard has to work as a salesman, just like his father. The house he designed for his young family stays on paper.
Zemeckis could have chosen just to focus on Richard and Margaret, but he takes us further back in time. We meet Lee Beekman (David Fynn) the enthusiastic inventor of an armchair that might just be iconic, if only they get the name right. Before him, Pauline Harter (Michelle Dockery) who is frightened by the trips by aircraft made by her husband, John (Gwilym Lee). The cast is mostly Anglo-Irish, rather than American. At one point, a Red Coat is subject to ridicule, and we immediately think of a MAGA supporter.
The lounge sees a birth, a death and a marriage, as well as an African American couple move in. In one pointed scene, a young boy is taught how to respond if a police officer stops his car. The America depicted is at once recognisable and troubling. Adaptation under economic and social duress is a necessity.
“Here” isn’t a feelgood film any more than Zemeckis and Hanks” 2000 film, “Cast Away” was. Endurance comes at a price. The one constant is the presence of a realtor, foregrounding the property’s attributes. The underlying message of the film is that Americans are quintessentially migratory. They trade up. A home is simply a staging point rather than a family heirloom. It is never truly owned. This foregrounds a bigger – and unwelcome – message to the film’s mostly unresponsive American audience, that the foundations you lay are in people rather than things. Richard and Margaret remain rightly proud of their lawyer daughter even as their relationship is under strain.
Zemeckis intends the film to function as a mirror to his audience. It is notable for the lack of exceptionalism. The pilot does not die in the air. A marriage does not survive unfulfilled promises. America remains unequal. We are not asked to respond to each scene on a moment-by-moment basis, rather respond to the whole. This is the first Robert Zemeckis film in decades where the innovation complements the ambition of the work. It is an invitation to existentialism, daring and challenging at a critical moment in American history, when the domestic defines who we are.
“Here” opened in UK cinemas on 17 January 2025