Here review: Tom Hanks and Robin Wright can't save this heavy-handed Forrest Gump reunion

Director Robert Zemeckis's ambitious domestic drama on the passage of time is a syrupy affair hampered by distracting de-aging technology.

Robin Wright and Tom Hanks in Here

Sony

★★☆☆☆

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With its opening segue from dinosaurs to the Ice Age to Indigenous people, Here signals itself as a kind of grand statement on time’s passage for director Robert Zemeckis. A workable alternative title could have been We Live in Time, were it not taken. Although the film soon turns into a multi-generational domestic drama, history and change sit high on its thematic agenda, which would suggest bracing ambition if the results didn’t so often land with the deadening thud of a dinosaur’s stomp.

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Adapting Richard McGuire’s graphic novel, Zemeckis reteams here with his Forrest Gump writer (Eric Roth) and stars, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright. Echoing Gump, Zemeckis uses experimental techniques and cutting-edge technology, notably the de-aging effects that make actors’ faces glisten so oddly. The camera mostly assumes one perspective, fixed on the land a house was built on in the early 20th century and then on the living room of that house over a century or so. As families pass through, the idea is that so does all of life, love and death, accompanied by some wincingly on-the-nose song choices about the same.

The characters range from Benjamin Franklin to an early-20th-century woman who berates her husband for his fixation on flying, convinced it will kill him. Another man invents the La-Z-Boy armchair, while a modern-day black family bring a robot vacuum to the home. But the primary focus falls on the family of a Second World War veteran (Paul Bettany) and his wife (Kelly Reilly), whose children include Richard (Tom Hanks), a would-be artist who marries his high-school sweetheart Margaret (Robin Wright). As Margaret becomes pregnant, Richard stops painting and becomes the family provider, setting up a decades-long tale of dreams deferred that unfolds while history happens around them.

Tom Hanks and Robin Wright in Here

Tom Hanks and Robin Wright in Here Sony

If the single-room perspective feels stagey, Zemeckis attempts to remedy the issue with an initially seductive trick. Comic-book-style boxes inside the frame introduce images from other eras, easing the transitions between years. But the effect becomes self-defeating: time slips by too smoothly, ironing out the kinks and creases in how it really passes.

Equally problematically, the de-aging effects that proved divisive in The Irishman haven’t evolved as fast as technology seems to change on screen in Here. The house sits in Pennsylvania, but the casts’ smoothed-out features come direct from Uncanny Valley. When Richard feigns fear as his daughter dresses as a ghost for Halloween, Hanks’s glacial skin generates the most chills.

Tom Hanks and Robin Wright in Here hugging each other

Tom Hanks and Robin Wright in Here. Sony

Fatally, Zemeckis seems more fascinated with this stylistic toolkit than with the stories and subtexts he applies it to. Ham-fisted echoes across eras – the pandemics, say – elicit groans. Dramatic ironies are rammed home with sledge-hammer finesse and a fatalist sigh, notably when one character declares a belief that 1942 will be a good year.

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Voiced sentiments about how time flies resemble fortune-cookie pickings even before two characters open fortune cookies. Big twists feel signposted to within an inch of their life, such that we don’t relate to the characters so much as watch over them like omniscient observers: when one character becomes forgetful, for example, we recognise Alzheimer’s long before they do. The characters register less as people than as illustrations of under-nourished ideas or heavy-handed messages, particularly when it comes to the desperately under-written black family.

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Nestled among these notions is the (again, voiced) idea that withholding dreams through worry won’t stop painful things from happening in life. You might as well take risks, Zemeckis wants to suggest, but Here feels too premeditated to embody that message, too calcified within its formal conceits. It’s only when the film trusts in Hanks and Wright to act their ages that their story moves us, helped by Alan Silvestri’s syrupy but disarmingly tender score. A more engaging film might have aimed to catch a sense of fleeting life in motion, but what we get in Here is a too often sterile reverie on stagnation.

Authors

Kevin Harley

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