'Here' briefing

2 (out of 4)

            “Life-affirming scmife-affirming!”

At first glance, Here functions as something of a 30-year reunion between director Robert Zemeckis, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright of 1994’s dopey, darn good Forrest Gump. It’s even more similar than it looks, as both weave a broad, syrupy tapestry of 20th century history and pop culture pitstops, though Here has to cram and contain it all to a static view of a plot of land, the central living space of a sturdy colonial home changing hands through generations as the film’s grand timespan isn’t satisfied to move in a linear direction the way, uh, LIFE DOES. This dreamy-eyed boomer nostalgia montage just subs out the bookending CG feather for a fussy hummingbird.

Two decades after his third pairing with Hanks for Zemeckis’ Polar Express, his inception into the foray of motion-capture, admittedly Here’s instantaneous de-aging technology is extraordinary magic. Maybe there’s an assist in makeup or post-production fine-tuning but there are stretches where the result is unnoticeable, roughly invisible as we long hoped it would be. From his other tech-testing 3D-animated features Beowulf and A Christmas Carol to other not-quite-there digital checkpoints like Joseph Kosinski’s Tron: Legacy and James Mangold’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, film innovation has inched us closer to the cusp of the uncanny valley, and with Here you can literally see how they’re ALMOST OUT, spinning on rim’s edge like a freaking basketball! Sure, trying to revert the slowly advancing Wright and Hanks back into beaming teenagers is like a domestic video game cut scene, but otherwise this movie’s basically out of the past in this regard, and that’s without even mentioning they all but solved de-aging an actor’s voice as well, WOWZA what a time to be alive!

And at least Robert’s heart is in the right place — a mixture of earnestness and brand-spanking-new film-form-futurism is what has made legends out of George Lucas and James Cameron, although somehow Zemeckis has always felt like if Cameron Crowe or James L. Brooks or some other comfortable, even more family friendly auteur got his hands dirty with all the envelope-pushing. It’s actually rare if Bobby Z. doesn’t pursue something testing the boundaries of visual effects, from the Back to the Future trilogy to Who Framed Roger Rabbit to Death Becomes Her to Gump and Contact, through the mo-cap era and into recent works that still insisted on innovations — Welcome to Marwen, The Witches and even his Pinocchio with Hanks (somehow not quite as nightmarish as you’d imagine) spell out a pretty lame leg of the late career, and aside from the decent Roald Dahl stint (don’t try to outdo Nicolas Roeg!), they’re all unremarkable excuses to go hogwild on the CGI. Even his autumnal epoch his pared down, more traditional and most appreciable films, his all too brief ‘mature’ era (Flight, The Walk, Allied), live and die by VFX.

And speaking of retarded reasons to get all technical, Here has to maintain visual variety by insisting the film be littered with transitional frame-within-frames, rarely aligning any clever juxtapositions, just nonsense like a TV broadcasting The Beatles on Ed Sullivan while you jump back to the native American timeline, uh what? It’s as if you’ve found this on YouTube and pop-ups are constantly begging you to exit out of them. With more brutal editing (and obviously less of the expected, sugary, greeting card schmaltz) there could be some real existential nuggets to unearth from a film with as much in common with The Tree of Life and Boyhood as it has with Michael Snow (like Wavelength had a Lifetime movie inside) and genuine experimental film. Zemeckis, for all his zealous reaching, arrives somewhere eerily safe on the cinematic plane. The first moments mimic Terrence Malick’s return to the primordial shape of the earth, a preamble into what the idea of being alive meant to the cloistered, divinely gifted director. If this movie miraculously managed to take its many strands of the family tree to heart and didn’t use them as filling to space out the lives of the central mid-century couple, this could have been a remarkable exploration of ancestry, progeny, the idea of one’s individual relationship to civilization or any other naval-gazing notions that, when ineloquently communicated, make you want to gag but under the right conditions have you dying to figure out the scope of your own life. This must be based on a real lineage (why would you reference Lay Z Boy and Benjamin Franklin so much if not?), it’s just too specific and scatterbrained. The original graphic novel, I assume, has something that screams MOVING COLLAGE more than Robert’s granny flick for those who prefer their reality rose-tinted.

But it really depends on who you are whether this movie will smack of honesty or just enlist cliché after cliché. Paul Bettany’s war vet alcoholic patriarch (played with so much dexterity it’s like he’s doing O’Neil) is the film’s surest acting asset — he understands the strange, living photo album theatricality that the world’s-a-stage gimmick has to offer. His character breaks down at Thanksgiving after his wife (an always welcome Kelly Reilly) has passed, and Wright’s own counterpart Margaret chokes up at her 50th birthday — OH GOD, SEIZE THE DAY, IT’S ALWAYS RIGHT NOW, TIME FLIES, GOLLY GEE — any more idioms and you won’t even have to make up any dialogue! The passing of ages, lifestyles and cultural concerns is such a weighty, cumbersome topic that Zemeckis is just too spineless to make the most of… Forrest Gump, for all the horrific manipulation of old footage, is a more bluntly tuned recollection of the recent chapters in America’s story — even when we’re honestly touching on divorce and disease and all the passed-down discomforts of life, Here is content to be recognizable but not relatable, too desperate and unfocused to weasel its way into your heart. 

This kind of philosophical filmmaking bets it all on the supplemental veracity, of which Here has a meager offering. Even the idea of a core memory is so treacly — the movie announces when an early moment will be called back to, and once the parting shot of the movie finally pushes the camera out of fixed place for the first time in 100 minutes simultaneously, it’s not exactly revelatory like Ozu working with a dolly. Between the maudlin melodramatics there are hints at what has made Zemeckis such a loud, often indisputably agreeable voice in pop filmmaking. But this was just baldfaced Oscar bait and a pretty poor showing of it too. If not for Bettany, this movie and the "It’s a Wonderful Life for Dummies" setup (OH GOD MY DREAMS ARE FALLING AT THE WAYSIDE FOR MONETARY CONCERNS… ain’t no somber reactions as train whistles blow, too subtle, and unlike Mary, Margaret wants anything other than to stay in the same crumby house) would be all too easy to dismiss — as it stands, Here is just a lofty, grandiloquent whiff. But if you live and breathe home decor this is the movie you’ve been waiting for!