Martin Scorsese seemed like he was onto something when The Irishman bolstered cutting-edge “de-aging” VFX that made its septuagenarian stars resemble their 20-year-old selves. Unfortunately, they still moved like old men. Who can forget the shot of “young” Robert De Niro feebly kicking some guy on the sidewalk? Snazzy computer effects can only do so much.
De-aging gets an impressive upgrade in Here, the latest VFX wonder from Robert Zemeckis. What a difference five years makes. This reunion between the stars of Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, easily looks as if it could have been shot mere days after—heck, even before—their 1994 Oscar winner. It’s just a shame that Here doesn’t have a script/concept that can sustain these impressive face-lifts. Snazzy computer effects, even improved ones, can only do so much.
If The Irishman’s problem is that it betrays the age of its stars when they move, Here’s flaw, or one of its flaws, is that it barely lets anyone move at all. The film offers a novel premise in that it observes the history of the world from a singular vantage point. Eventually, the fixed camera sees a house built around it. Families come and go, establishing lives that Here glimpses in snippets. There are joys and heartaches in a living room that used to be stomping ground for dinosaurs before the comet hit and was later hunting territory for Indigenous people pre-contact. The dinosaurs ultimately get off easy here.
The bulk of this carousel of home movies favours the life of Richard (Hanks). Richard is an all-American boy, per se, who spends nearly his entire life in the same home. His father (Paul Bettany) and mother (Kelly Reilly) buy the house and raise their family there. Everyone admires the stately colonial manor across the street. They remark how it was formerly owned by Benjamin Franklin’s illegitimate son William Franklin (Daniel Betts), who pops up in some of the hokey flashbacks. Richard introduces his family to Margaret (Wright), who confesses after her first night at the house, “I could spend the rest of my life here.” Those words come back to haunt Margaret.
Days and years go by as Margaret does indeed spend an eternity in that old house. It’s truly amazing to see Hanks and Wright look so authentically youthful when Here begins. The spark fades with age, though, as years sharing the house with Richard’s parents weigh on Margaret. As Richard and Margaret age, their increasingly weary faces reflect the strain of keeping their marriage together. She wants a house of their own, but Richard worries. He’s one of those guys who wants to save everything for another day.
While the visual effects truly are remarkable, as the de-aging proves even more impressive than the dinosaurs or the hummingbird that echoes Forrest Gump’s floating feather, the Russian Ark conceit of seeing the world through a single vantage point ultimately wears thin. It doesn’t allow anything in Here to connect emotionally. Everyone moves about the space strangely. From the 1800s to present, people enter the hallowed living room as if they’re Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer. They hit their marks like actors in an early talkies affixing themselves below the microphone. People stand there and weirdly talk to the corner of the room. What works in comic book panels isn’t necessarily effective framing for film shot.
There aren’t many close-ups, either, and Here keeps one at a distance. Despite the wholesome material and best efforts by Hanks and Wright, it all just rings false even if, visually, the gimmick doubles as the frames of its graphic novel origins whilst adapting Richard Maguire’s work. Even reliable performers like Michelle Dockery (in one of the flashbacks) and Bettany/Reilly are shockingly wooden here, reduced to delivering ham-fisted declarative sentences. It’s all so mawkish.
Narratively, the script by Zemeckis and Eric Roth has a lot of fun playing the time warp. But, again, taking a peek into the lives of one family and then the next, and flipping between eras with no rhyme or reason, one really feels the passage of time here. The flirts through the ages have more fumbles than hits. Here often loses the thread when it leaves Richard and Margaret to, say, check in on the Indigenous people who previously inhabited their land and barely get speaking parts. The wholesome portrait of settler families on Indian land inadvertently makes Here a rosy celebration of colonialism.
Zemeckis and Roth also make curious story beats that don’t hold up to basic fact-checking. One recurring thread observes Lee Beekman (David Fynn) as he putters about with a newfangled chair, the “Relaxy Boy” while his wife, Stella (Ophelia Lovibond) cleans, dances, and makes cocktails. By the end, he dubs his invention the Laz-E-Boy. But even a quick Google search indicates that said product was conceived by cousins Edwin Shoemaker and Edward Knabusch in Monroe, Michigan. Their house was hardly across the street from William Franklin’s estate in Illinois. And the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs hardly made a dent in Billy Franklin’s backyard. But, sure, they could probably see the flash when it hit down in Mexico. Let’s just assume that’s a south-facing window in Richard’s living room. The revisionist history adds another layer of cheese–of which there many–atop the casserole.
Many of the historical snippets also have contemporary tells. For example, one flashback presents the Spanish Flu pandemic in which people carry their masks instead of wearing them. That feels far more 2020 than 1918. There’s even a flash to the COVID-19 pandemic when housemaid (Anya Marco Harris) gets the virus without so much as a little cough. She just hams it up with some air freshener. Little, if any, of the dialogue sounds historically accurate. If there’s one thing Here proves with its Forrest Gump reunion, it’s that the all-American cheese of Zemeckis and Hanks is timeless.
