“Here” is such an empty cinematic experience that it summons up everything you ever hated about a Robert Zemeckis movie and the Zemeckis “style.”
An Oscar winner with enduring classics scattered across his resume — “Cast Away,” “Back to the Future,” “Romancing the Stone,” “Flight” — Zemeckis has long been a filmmaker overly fond of the technical challenges and the tech “gimmick” he could lean on for a given film.
From back-engineering the characters and worlds of “Back to the Future” to the walking-dead-Meryl Streep of “Death Becomes Her,” to manipulating “Forrest Gump” into scenes with historic figures and just plain digitizing actors for “The Polar Express,” “A Christmas Carol” and “Beowulf,” he’s often lost track of the forest while figuring out how to fake the trees.
With “Here,” the technical challenge is taking a piece of land through time and showing people living, building and dying on it over the millennia.
There’s a whiff of Orson Welles’ adaptation of “The Magificent Ambersons” in this soap opera saga, the timeless appeal of nostalgia. But that gets lost in a narrative which deigns to go back so far as to show us New Jersey Jurassic pre-history, climaxing with a Native American couple (Joel Oulette, Dannie McCallum).
We glimpse the Colonial Era construction of a magnificent (Ambersons style) house owned by Benjamin Franklin’s estranged loyalist “bastard” son (Daniel Betts), see a newer house eventually built across the street from it, drop in on a dawn-of-the-“aeroplane” era couple (Michelle Dockery and Gwilym Lee) who move into it, and watch a succeeding pre-WWII pair (Ophelia Lovibond, David Fynn) who just know their fortunes will be made if they can just get SOMEbody to buy and manufacture the inventor-husband’s “Relixichair, RelaxiBoy, “Lazyboy” recliner.
There’s a modern day Black couple (Nikki Amuka-Bird, Nicholas Pinnock) who move in and who live there long enough to have to have “the talk” about what to do when a cop stops their son for “driving while Black.”
But the “story” is about one family, traced from the day a veteran (Paul Bettany) returns home from WWII to buy this house across from the William Franklin House with his wife (Kelly Reilly) and they raise kids, one of whom will grow up to be Tom Hanks who’ll marry Robin Wright, reuniting the iconic Baby Boomer couple from “Forrest Gump.”
We’ll see “Richard” and “Margaret” as lovestruck teens, thanks to the technological “de-aging” now available via CGI. To give Zemeckis his due, the effect is remarkable and the actors are good enough to make us quickly forget the special effect in their wrinkle-free scenes.
But is their story of youth and dreams and dreams abandoned and marital trials and parents aging and dying of even the slightest interest, even to Baby Boomers who have lived out those versions of “The American Dream?”
It makes absolute sense that Zemeckis shot this quintessentially America saga entirely on British soundstages — save for the sequences that are wholly digitized. “Sterile” describes the visual experience. And it’s easy to understand why there are no still shots from any other era or its characters depicted in the movie extant on the Internet, because Zemeckis & Co. paid that little attention to those “Here” and “back then” or “now” storylines and characters.
The Zemeckis trademarks of reaching for low-hanging fruit and leaping at the obvious — in casting, settings, messaging and music — pops up as we hear the pop tunes of each era wafting off the Victrola, the transistor radio or TV (The Beatles on “Ed Sullivan!” How original!).
How much imagination do you figure it took to put Michelle Dockery in the same era and wardrobe she wore for “Downton Abbey?”
As we watch digital zoom-ins on characters and scenic details from the various epochs digitally dissolve back and forth into different eras, we can’t help but notice the script is pretty much shapeless and the dialogue “graphic novel” banal. There’s not a quote-worthy line from it. If you’ve seen and heard the trailers, you’ve tasted the best on offer.
“You know, if you like, you could spend the rest of the night here.” “I could spend the rest of my LIFE here!”
Zemeckis turns his daughter into a nepo baby by casting Zsa Zsa Zemeckis as Margaret and Richard’s teen jamming to The Runaways (“Cherry Bomb”) and getting into “The Jane Fonda Workout.”
Still, there are moments that evoke Welles’ (gimmicky for its day) “Ambersons” nostalgia. But in chopping this story into the vignettes required to tell it, nothing really resonates, touches or for that matter, entertains.
It’s “Gump” rendered in the shallowest strokes, an “evocative” saga with all the depth of Billy Joel’s Boomer anthem, “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”
Zemeckis is always a filmmaker to show his peers “the future” by demonstrating a proof-of-concept of their medium’s latest effects and trickery. We all believe Deloreans can fly and that jetliners can be landed upside down and actors can play younger versions of themselves and need to ensure that their “likeness” is owned by themselves and their heirs, lest some Future Zemeckis digitally manipulate Hanks and Wright and Bettany into, say, porn.
But in a storytelling medium, story comes first. When Zemeckis swings and misses, it’s always because he’s lost focus on that forest in favor of the latest trick for digitizing the trees.
Rating: PG-13, sexual situations, smoking, alcohol abuse, profanity
Cast: Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Michelle Dockery, Paul Bettany, Kelly Reilly, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Nicholas Pinnock, Joel Oulette, Dannie McCallum, Daniel Betts and Angus Wright
Credits: Directed by Robert Zemeckis, scripted by Eric Roth and Robert Zemeckis, based on a Robert McGuire graphic novel. A Sony Tristar release.
Running time: 1:44
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