November 4, 2024 · Watch the official trailer
A single place can provide so much history or evoke feelings of nostalgia that simply being in that spot can be responsible for engraining moments in our life story.
Director Robert Zemeckis seeks to examine this from a more nuanced perspective with his latest film simply titled “Here,” a time-bending tale not just about one particular person but a solitary place in the world.
Keeping a still camera pointed in one direction for over 90 minutes, Zemeckis takes audiences forwards and backwards, overlapping incidents that happen in a single place to create a tapestry of life narrative that is one of the most unique films to come along in perhaps the past decade.
Structurally, however, “Here” doesn’t truly provide an eloquent narrative or storyline to keep viewers engaged, which often leaves the film feeling like somewhat like a gimmick to have a static film rather than an urgent tale of necessity.
What works best about “Here” amid the chaos of audiences being teleported through time but not space is the exceptionally well-done editing and production design that make the single point in space a character of its own.
This leaves the audience to truly become a fly on the wall observing events at a voyeuristically close distance and the ways in which Zemeckis allows viewers to see around and behind their vantage point in intentional ways shows that the concept of the film was given far more nuanced thought than its lacking screenplay.
Though there is a much larger, often nameless cast of characters that inhabit the world of “Here,” audiences will no doubt find its two erstwhile leads, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, to be the central throughline with which to engage with Zemeckis’ film. Hanks especially is well versed enough to play his Richard up or down in age with nuance and thoughtfulness in spite of how de-aging technology may make his performance feel more superficial with a softening of his profile.
As Wright’s Margaret enters and exits through the world of “Here” in a far more outsider way, acting as a visitor to Richard’s home before falling in love and marrying him, the differences between the couple and the performances between the two leads are clear
However, the chemistry that Hanks and Wright have onscreen and how their relationship evolves and changes through the course of “Here” is inhibited significantly by Zemeckis’ constant need to flash forward and back in time, thrusting audiences in and out of special moments between the couple.
This is even more so the case for Richard’s parents, played by Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly, who feel a bit more caricature and one-note in their turns because it’s likely that their characters were given very rough outlines in the screenplay by Zemeckis and Eric Roth rather than full-fledged development to go through in “Here” and feel significantly more secondary to Richard and Margaret.
The visuals of “Here” and the unique ways Zemeckis and editor Jesse Goldsmith overlap and layer the chronology of the film on top of each other does have a distinct vibrancy that blends the concepts of the source graphic novel by Richard McGuire with the best parts of the film’s premise. This gives audiences opportunities to see how history knowingly and sometimes unknowingly repeats itself and how a single place can have such distinct yet different meaning to people based on their experiences.
While the film could be on a shortlist for several technical categories like editing and production design, the ambitions of “Here” don’t seem fruitful when it comes to major awards consideration given the middling quality of the film’s screenplay and languishing, meandering narrative.
“Here” has a look that may translate best to audiences on the big screen, though the pacing and relative redundancy of the screenplay will also detract some cinephiles from checking out or staying through the 105-minute run time, leaving Zemeckis’ film perhaps something best seen in a single place that has meaning to the viewer outside the theater.
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