‘Here’ Goes Nowhere: Tom Hanks, Robin Wright and the AI Gimmick that Fell Flat

If you think Tom Hanks cannot make a bad movie, you haven’t seen Here. This phony, gimmicky and tedious waste of time might not be the first film in the abominable new process called A.I., but I pray it will be the last. The lure going in is that it reunites the major players from  the smash hit 1994 comedy Forrest Gump—Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, writer Eric Roth and director Robert Zemeckis—in a lame attempt to make more money by capitalizing on a great film’s financial success using a revolutionary new technology that reduces overhead by eliminating the need to hire real actors. It’s a hateful experiment that backfires, because filling the screen with computer-generated robots defeats the whole purpose of making movies in the first place. Here isn’t here, there, or anywhere at all. It’s like an aimless, meandering comic book you can thumb your way through just by looking at the pictures. Dare I mention it is also a colossal bore?

Based on a novel by Richard McGuire I never intend to read, Here is a long and plotless mess about the passage of time in a single space defined through the years by imagery that begins with dinosaurs, progresses through cowboys and arrow-pointing Indians to the invention of the wheel, and ends up with traffic horns and supermarkets—all seen through the eyes of a single family. Enter a couple named Al and Rose (Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly) who are looking for a house. They can’t afford the 1800-sq.-foot manse erected in 1900 that replaces the dinosaurs with a permanent residence on the property, but they buy it anyway and spend the rest of their lives in the same living room where the only thing that changes is the sofa. Along with avoiding the threat of a gargantuan budget, the movie saves a fortune on sets.

Through the years, Al and Rose are joined by a growing family that includes their son Richard (a dull performance by Tom Hanks), his wife Margaret (gorgeous but wasted Robin Wright), and their daughter Vanessa (a fledgling actor from the director’s own family with the ghastly monicker Zsa Zsa Zemeckis). Richard is a character of unspecific value to the family, although he is the first one to go to college, and Margaret, on her 5oth birthday, regrets all the things she missed through the years, trapped in this kind of house (and this kind of movie). She never went to college because she was too busy being a wife and mother, never saw Paris in the spring because it was too far away from home, and never spent the night in Yellowstone National Park because it was always too crowded.  

Rose dies, Al has a stroke and moves in with Richard and Margaret, intruding on any possibility of peace and togetherness in their autumnal years by prattling on nostalgically about what he did in World War Two. Generations of friends and relatives come and go, nobody ever seems to go to work, and it’s always Christmas. These people are not rich, powerful, controversial, accomplished or even tortured enough to sustain interest while the viewer waits for them to change the world or hire an interior decorator. There’s no tension, no schadenfreude, no complexity woven into the narrative to demonstrate why we’re expected to care about these folks for nearly two hours that seem more like nearly two days. When Margaret finally walks out on the entire family, we only wonder what took her so long.  Tom Hanks does what’s right for the film, convincingly aging from a high-school student to a wrinkled old man near death in ways that can’t be solved by the makeup department, but he can’t invent a cinematic raison d’etre if it isn’t in the script. While it’s a film about the passage of time, there’s no archival footage or revealing intimacy in the relationships among characters to explain why Here is anything to enhance enthusiasm for more movies about A.I. Color it long, clumsy, gimmicky, schmaltzy and pointless.