Here

Grade: C+

There’s a weird, unintentionally funny through-line in Here. People keep finding out about deaths 20 minutes after they happen. “I just spoke to the doctor. He didn’t make it. It happened 20 minutes ago.” “So-and-so died, 20 minutes ago.” I once had an English Composition teacher whose comments never matched the grade. If you just read what he wrote on your paper when you got it back without looking at the grade, you’d think it was much lower. B- was the worst I did on a paper in his class, and what he had to say there…ouch. I imagine I will do a bit of that here. I’m giving Here more benefit of the doubt than every other critic’s take that I’ve read. It’s not a terrible movie, just a shallow, fake, frustrating one, with no shortage of aspects to nitpick.

If you’ve never seen a film before, or if Here was the first one ever made, it would be a beautiful, amazing, revelatory piece of cinema. However, they’ve been making ‘em for a while, and if you’re reading this, you’ve been around the block many times. The gimmick is that the camera is fixed in one place the entire time. We see the prehistoric era, then Colonial times, where none other than Benjamin Franklin rides by on a horse and buggy. Eventually, we see a house being built, which ultimately becomes a suburban living room. As if Franklin’s presence wasn’t enough, every conceivable life event and movie cliche takes place in this room with a large window looking out into the street. A child is conceived in that room, and later born there. Thanksgiving meals transpire; odd that they wouldn’t be in the kitchen, even after Y2K. Weddings and deaths happen. The La-Z-Boy is invented there. How much action can one room get?

We see the evolution of various couples and families who have lived in the house. Sometimes we get more than one at the same time, via a picture-in-picture like technique where part of a different time period is shown in one square or rectangle on the screen. The family we follow the most, of course, is the one that includes Tom Hanks and Robin Wright – reunited together, after 30 years, with their Forrest Gump director Robert Zemeckis. Here employs so much CGI/AI aging and de-aging that it almost looks animated, like Zemeckis’s The Polar Express.

Hanks is supposed to be 18 when we first meet his grownup character, yet the best they can do is make him look like Splash/Big-era Hanks. Younging somebody up can only go so far; voices don’t lie. It’s jarring to hear Hanks, who is pushing 70, say lines like “Mom! Dad! I want you to meet my girlfriend. We’ve been going steady.” Wright isn’t given much to do other than utter variations of musings about how time flies and we’re getting older. I tried to play the “when are we seeing the real Hanks/Wright, with the least amount of studio trickery” game, but could never pinpoint it. Everybody looks so filtered and artificial. The comic strip vignette motif makes it impossible to grasp onto any particular storyline. The movie marches us through every Wonder Years milestone in the book.

A character’s oncoming dementia is telegraphed a few times in a forced way. Think Norman Thayer’s speech in On Golden Pond, but not good like that. I hate to compare them. This comes full circle in the last scene, when they are brought back to you-know-where, and in an attempt to jerk tears, they suddenly remember a fairly arcane detail from the past, after not being in great shape mentally. I’m a crier if there’s a sweet moment in a movie, even if I don’t otherwise like the film – but here, in Here, I had nothing. Not even close. What happened to what was left of my interest? The characters will hear about it in 20 minutes.

Grade: C+