Here Review

Here is a film that is stuck and literally has nowhere to go.

Tom Hanks and Robin Wright reunite with Robert Zemeckis and the Forrest Gump co-writer Eric
Roth, but this is a film based on a graphic novel by Richard McGuire that attempts to tell a story
of a specific location from the time of the dinosaurs to the modern era. It’s an interesting
concept in theory, but Zemekis decides to lock the camera into one specific location and focal
length for the entire run time of the movie. This decision becomes a gimmick that wears out
within minutes into the film and literally keeps the audience at length from the characters and
stories being told. From this fixed angle, we watch millions of years pass starting with
dinosaurs, moving through the ice age, forests grow, Indigenous people hunt deer, we move to
Colonial America, into the industrial revolution and civil war era when our house is finally built,
and through a few more eras to the modern day. This angle never changes for 103 minutes until
the final moments of the story which makes the film feel like a stage play and doesn’t allow the
language of film – close-ups, medium shots, tracking shots, zooms, to help tell the story.
Characters are given blocking to move them towards and away from the camera to give some
movement, but it never allows us to feel close to these characters.

This might have been something to overcome if the script allowed us into the stories being
presented to us, but by focusing on 4-5 different families that live in this house, and not
allowing those families to have intertwining stories or themes, we never move below the
surface of these characters lives. We know that a woman is unhappy she cannot take place in
the Suffrage movement and worried about her husband’s desire to fly planes. We know a man
creates the La-Z-Boy. We have a token African American family who get 3-4 scenes, the longest
of which is the father teaching his son who recently got a driver’s license what to do if pulled
over by a police officer. It’s insulting and pandering. We never feel that these characters are
living through history, but rather history is happening around them. We hear about Benjamin
Franklin flying a kite in a storm, we see a modern family with a Roomba wearing masks during
Covid, we see Indigenous people hunting deer, we hear about the Beatles on the radio, but
none of those milestones in human history reflect on the characters or inform the audience as
to who these people are. It’s just a way to tell us where we are in time since the story is told in
a non-linear fashion.

The other major issue with the film, is it is overall depressing. No one seems to be enjoying
their lives outside of the La-Z-Boy recliner inventor who sells his invention and he and his wife
move to California. Paul Bettany plays a WWII veteran named Al and Kelly Reilly plays his wife
Rose who have a family and their son Richard (Hanks) become the semi-focal point of the film.
These two parents put everything else in their lives aside to raise their children in a happy and
stable home, but we know that both have some resentment in marrying young and giving up
the dreams of youth for the stagnation of the suburbs. History repeats itself when Richard
(Hanks) meets Margaret and she becomes pregnant at 20 years old. She and Richard get
married in the house and move in and raise their kids, repeating the steps of his parents.
Margaret is more vocal than Rose was in her unhappiness living in the home, and not pursuing
her dreams of seeing Paris and having a job outside of the home. Her relationship with Richard is rocky at best, and her later health issues are telegraphed so loudly and often, there is no
suspense when the diagnosis is revealed.

The film is full of schmaltz and never earns the tear-jerker status is desperately wants to
achieve. It’s all surface level and it bounces from time period to time period, it never develops
these stories or the characters, and by the end, you wonder why you wasted the 104 minutes
of your life watching theirs. There are no emotional stakes in the film, we’re just a fly on the
wall, floating along and watching time unfold. So when the camera is finally allowed to slowly
zoom in on Wright’s face and the camera dollies around her and Hanks, it’s almost laughable as
she says how much she loved her life and living HERE. If I had a dollar for everytime a character
mentions how time moves only one way, and how we’re living HERE, I would be a happy man.
Nothing is earned here, and while it will likely do well at the box office because of the reuniting
of Wright and Hanks, it likely won’t earn much after that opening weekend. Halfway through
the film, I was longing for the return of the AARP commercials that ran non-stop at their
sponsored screening of the film. That’s never a good sign, and this is not a good movie. It’s one
of my least favorite films of the year.

Grade: D-