'Here' review: Robert Zemeckis, Tom Hanks, and Robin Wright reunite

At 72, American filmmaker Robert Zemeckis has a storied career on par with few others. He's the visionary behind the extraordinary collision of live-action comedy and cartoon mayhem that is Who Framed Roger Rabbit. He birthed the sci-fi/comedy bliss of Back to the Future and the campy splendor of the cult-adored Death Becomes Her. But far from the madcap humor of these offerings, he helmed the iconic Forrest Gump, a literary adaptation that thrilled audiences and the Academy, who bestowed upon the decades-traversing drama a total of 6 Oscars, including Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture. 

Here, Zemeckis' latest offering, has a lot in common with Forrest Gump. On a casting level, it reunites Forrest Gump stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, who once more play a couple of young lovers, finding themselves in the 1950s and 1960s. It also reteams Zemeckis with Forrest Gump's Oscar-winning screenwriter Eric Roth, who is tasked this time around with adapting a graphic novel from New York Times illustrator Richard McGuire. Here is also a heartfelt drama spanning time, although instead of mere decades, it takes place across centuries, even millennia.

Yet within this familiar framework, Zemeckis tales big risks that are more akin to his less-celebrated Hanks collaborations, chiefly The Polar Express and Disney's live-action Pinocchio. Where in his earlier films, he blew our minds and won acclaim with practical effects, his later dive into digital effects have often veered into an ugly, uncanny valley. But even as it falters in the details, there's undeniable reason to celebrate the ambition and earnestness of Here. 

Here is a story across time about family. 

Remarkably, Here has the look of being filmed in one shot. To be clear, it is not seemingly one long take, like the exhilarating real-time zombie thriller MadS. Replicating the look of McGuire's comic — as teased in the trailer — the whole of Here is shot from a planted perspective, while the action unfurls before it. The trick is, it won't play out chronologically but instead somewhat simultaneously. 

The frame Zemeckis presents shows a New England living room within a "half-Colonial" home, built in 1900. There, various furniture and decor will come and go in smooth visual transitions, and even fade away to show a swamp of galumphing mud, where dinosaurs frolic, then a plain made desolate and white by an ice age, then a verdant forest where Indigenous Americans hunt, gather, and fall in love. But mostly, Here is set in a living room, following families from the early 20th century, the post-Jazz Age, post-World War II, and beyond. 

There, stories collide through frames within the frame, which are outlined in white, a nod to their comic book inspiration. So while much of the scene may be set in the 1960s, where a teenage boy (Tom Hanks, courtesy of de-aging CGI — more on that in a bit!) introduces squabbles with his drunk dad (Paul Bettany), an inner frame might reveal the families who came before. Images of weddings, Thanksgiving celebrations, marital spats, and funerals can potentially pile on top of the scene, succinctly displaying all the stories that play out in this seemingly average space in one hour and 44 minutes of runtime. So, why does it feel so much longer?

Here is a strange experiment at war with itself. 

Watching the frame-within-frame device unfold across the screen, it's easy to see how it could work in a graphic novel. On the page, each square urges you to imagine what could lie just outside its borders, a constant reminder of perspective but also how the limitations of the media of the comic book itself can inspire your imagination. 

Film as a form is considered by its audience more literal, which is Zemeckis' first challenge. While in some scenes, the characters exit the frame — inviting the audience to assume what happens off camera — the visual stimuli of new information piling up every moment allows little time for the meaning of this device to wash over us. And yet, despite the collage effect at play across the story, the film feels stuck in its locked position. One might wonder why this spot —  and perhaps that it could be any spot is precisely the point. But the fixed location makes the movie feel like a recording of a stage show more than a film, with performances to match. 

Zemeckis' choices are daring and often jarring. 

While the movie leaps across time, a star-stuffed ensemble treads the boards of this living room. Among them are not only Tom Hanks and Robin Wright as teen lovers who get married, have kids, and face a wide array of mature troubles in this space, but also Michelle Dockery as a turn-of-the-century suffragette, Ophelia Lovibond as a spirited flapper with David Fynn as her besotted inventor husband, Daniel Betts as a frustrated bastard son of Benjamin Franklin, Nikki Amuka-Bird as a wealthy 2020s businesswoman, and Joel Oulette and Dannie McCallum as an unnamed Indigenous couple. 

But the main storyline kicks off with Paul Bettany as a WII vet and Kelly Reilly as his doting wife. Their story is cliche, with him being a quick-to-anger patriarch whose parenting tools are yelling and endless glasses of bourbon, while she is the smiling mother devoted to smoothing everything over until she physically can't any longer. The rough edges of Roth's script are only enhanced by the pair's performance style, which is broadly theatrical. Perhaps the idea is to mimic the grandeur of Golden Era cinema — those 1940s black-and-white classics featuring debonair men and fast-talking dames. But this theatricality stretches across the timeline, though it softens if a character is more emotionally stiff (Dockery) or pensive (Wright). Still, the tone Zemeckis pursues calls attention to itself, keeping the audience from settling into the story. 

Interestingly, Zemeckis rejects the standard American movie pursuit of performed authenticity. This movie is not remotely concerned with how people actually talk, but prefers a far more sentimental approach that veers into parable. These characters not only inexplicably rush into big life decisions — like giving up dreams of painting as soon as a survival gig is achieved — but also repeatedly deliver Our Town-like revelations about the cruelty of time's endless momentum. Here is a deeply wistful film, always fretting about how fast time goes by, and yet its own screen time feels like a crawl. 

Roth's main storyline about this 20th-century family is belabored by cliche, making its every reveal feel a bit inevitable. The wordless story of the Indigenous couple, who fall in love, raise their child, die, and mourn, is simplistic but mostly elegant — save for a calamitous close-up revealing just how awkwardly waxen the effects make-up looks. Hanks and company, however, are given scenes that belabor their purpose, spelling out every emotion and telegraphing every turn. So even while they are ardent in their performance, the effect is stagnation, exacerbated by the fixed-camera perspective. 

Here feels more like a play or a gallery exhibit than a film. 

Perhaps this concept of a physical space as a sort of palimpsest, with characters living parallel lives, might have been more compelling on a stage or as a visual projection in a gallery. In the latter, the dialogue could have been pared down, or even eradicated to allow the viewer more freedom to interpret the action, rather than being spoon-fed the emotional beats. If it were played upon a stage, the character's aging could have been communicated through costume and gesturing, wigs and make-up instead of the uncanny technology Zemeckis employs in Here. 

As it is, the CGI employed to turn 68-year-old Hanks and 58-year-old Wright into teenagers is distracting, the same way the bizarre dead-eyed animated characters in Polar Express undercut its Yuletide wonder. Here's VFX team might be able to digitally redefine jawlines and erase wrinkles, but the people who remain don't look real and definitely don't look like teenagers. This effect isn't disastrous, but it does distance us from the reality the film wishes to present because its artificiality cannot be ignored. Theater audiences are more ready and willing to embrace the fantasy, even if the seams of a wig cap or a microphone taped to a forehead are showing. In film, our suspension of disbelief flickers whenever a digital effect looks, well, like a digital effect. And Here often flaunts CGI's limitations. 

This de-aging distraction inevitably draws our eyes to other bizarre details, like a birthday cake that is clearly a prop because it apparently weighs as much as styrofoam. Or how strange it is that the aspiring painter who dreamed of being a professional artist only ever paints what exists in this particular living room. Like in Polar Express and Pinocchio, Zemeckis seems so enchanted by his vision that he's missed the details in the execution that could mar it. He can see the forest beyond his living room, but not the trees. 

In the end, Here works as a movie in fits. Some scenes are undeniably enchanting, including every bit of Lovibond and Fynn as they romance while designing a reclining chair. Other scenes are less effective, primarily because the theatrical tone of the film clashes with the very real and traumatic topics they touch on, which we ourselves in the audience experience — like grappling with grief, fretting over parenting, or dealing with dementia. I found myself wishing it'd been a tight and tantalizing short film instead. As a whole, Here is far from the cohesive and compelling drama of Forrest Gump, far from the exhilarating world-building of Who Framed Roger Rabbit or Death Becomes Her. 

In many ways, Here is an experiment in framing and concept that fails. And yet, I'm in awe that Zemeckis did it. Even with the movie's rough edges, his passion and sentimentality is as clear as ever.

Here was reviewed out of its World Premiere at AFI Fest. The movie will open in theaters Nov. 1.