Here [Review]
Robert Zemeckis gets the Forrest Gump band back together to make Here, an adaptation of the graphic novel by Richard McGuire.
Here. Credit: TriStar Pictures / Sony Pictures
Robert Zemeckis’ latest film reunites him with his Forrest Gump collaborators—writer Eric Roth and stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright. Despite its sometimes saccharine feeling, Here is one of Zemeckis’ best films in recent memory. It’s an affecting drama that doesn’t reach the heights of its source material, the graphic novel by Richard McGuire.
Here is a difficult work to adapt. It follows different people and events occupying the same space over hundreds of years—in modern times, a suburban home’s living room across the street from a historic colonial mansion—showing the drama unfolding that connects the human experience across generations, notably through a single, fixed camera angle.
Here. Credit: TriStar Pictures / Sony Pictures
The graphic novel is loose in its structure, jumping rapidly back and forth in time with very short vignettes connected by common emotional experiences in the space in a lyrical and poetic way. Zemeckis and Roth chose to simplify by focusing on and exploring family dynamics, primarily centered on a specific family, the Youngs, who occupied the house for two and a half generations, turning the work into an unconventional family melodrama with brief vignettes that interrupt the narrative.
The film opens with a sequence showing the extinction of dinosaurs and the advent of the Ice Age before reaching relatively modern times—the source material dips into prehistory, but never so bombastically. While I think Zemeckis’ choice of conveying the ancient past is overdramatic and unnecessary, I agree with his choice to cut the parts of the source material that take place in the future. Fortunately, we never go this far back in time again.
Here. Credit: TriStar Pictures / Sony Pictures
Instead, we look in on several groups of people over several eras, beginning in 1609 and ending in 2022. We spend most of our time with the Young family, starting with WW2 vet Al (Paul Bettany) and wife Rose (Kelly Reilly), who move into the home in 1945 and raise their children, and their son Richard (Tom Hanks), who becomes a teen father and moves in with his soon-to-be wife Margaret (Robin Wright) in the 1960s, who raise their child there as well. Richard and Margaret never move out, creating one of the film's central conflicts.
Occasionally, the film shows us vignettes from other eras, some of which come off as clumsy, including a shoehorned inclusion of the COVID epidemic contrasted with the Spanish Flu outbreak. We touch on an Indigenous man (Joel Oulette) and woman (Dannie McCallum) in the 1600s; William Franklin (Daniel Betts) in the 1700s; the first occupants of the home, John (Gwilym Lee) and Pauline Harter (Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery), circa 1910; inventor Leo Beekman (David Fynn) and his wife Stella (Ophelia Lovibond) from the 1920s to the early 1940s; and finally, Devon (Nicholas Pinnock) and Helen Harris (Nikki Amuka-Bird), with son Justin (Cache Vanderpuye), a black family who buy the house from the Young family in 2015.
Here. Credit: TriStar Pictures / Sony Pictures
The film’s production is impressive on a technical level. The living room is a physical set, expertly dressed to evoke the film’s various areas; it feels like a living, breathing, evolving character. The fixed camera angle necessitated practical in-camera effects to accommodate actors’ height differences as they move toward and away from the camera. It also required a new lens invented for the film to manage depth of field and focus.
Digital effects were essential to realize the film. The exterior we see through the living room’s bay window is an LED display with real-time game engine graphics; it looks great and undoubtedly provides more immersion and authenticity for the actors than a green screen would. The digital makeup that made it possible for Hanks and Wright to play their characters from age 18 to nearly 80 is also impressive, only appearing uncanny when they are their youngest selves. According to the press notes, Zemeckis and the actors could see their performances with the digital makeup rendered in real-time via a second on-set monitor, which helped to tweak their physicality when portraying themselves at younger ages.
Here. Credit: TriStar Pictures / Sony Pictures
The film faithfully adapts the graphic novel's visual language, using panels to create a collage of “windows” into the past. The motif is brought to life brilliantly on the screen, seamlessly overlaying action from one time period over the context of another rather than simply cutting to another scene and time. It’s highly effective and visually appealing. The adaptation is more faithful in its visual technique than its narrative.
Compared to the graphic novel, the film is overly sentimental in a hamfisted way. It is more concerned with sometimes saccharinely portrayed family events, melodrama, and nostalgia-laden portrayals of specific eras, while the original work is a meditation on how shared experience and common humanity supersede the ephemerality of our existence and our impermanence.
Nevertheless, Here is an effective melodrama despite lacking the depth of the original work. Sentimentality is a hallmark of Zemeckis’ work and his stamp on his version of the material, which I couldn’t imagine him adapting any other way.
Here, from TriStar Pictures and Sony Pictures, opens in theaters on Friday, November 1, 2024.
