Okay, Boomer
Robert Zemeckis’s de facto sequel to ‘Forrest Gump’ may be even more insufferable, if that’s even possible.
HEre
Director: Robert Zemeckis • Writers: Eric Roth, Robert Zemeckis, based on the graphic novel by Richard McGuire
Starring: Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Paul Bettany, Kelly Reilly
USA • 1hr 44mins
Opens Hong Kong Dec 19 • IIA
Grade: D
People blather on and on all the time about what a “great” filmmaker Robert Zemeckis is. Sorry, but I’m not the Back to the Future stan many are, and personally the pleasures of Romancing the Stone and Contact are entirely down to the cast (Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas in the former) and the heady source material (Carl Sagan in the latter). The rest of his oeuvre is average at best, and ever since he started down a tech path in 2004, with The Polar Express, a path he needs to get the fuck off of, Zemeckis has lobbed one nearly unwatchable waking nightmare (Beowulf) after another (Welcome to Marwen) after another (Pinocchio). I’m totally down for a big swing, but after as many misses as Zemeckis has had it’s time to sit your ass on the bench.
But no, he’s back at it, this time with Here, an almost experimental historical drama, using a fixed perspective in one space to lay out the history of America. It’s another big swing heavily reliant on tech, but what makes Zemeckis’s brand of big swing misses so agonising is the singular boomer nostalgia that courses through the veins of all his work. Again, I have no problem with nostalgia; we’re all frequently comforted by it and have had many a riotous, drunken singalong because of it. But Zemeckis’s sentimentality gets in the way of any real insight when he deploys it – or should I say weaponises it. It’s what made Forrest Gump so aggravating, and it’s what makes Here, essentially an extension of that dross, so utterly baffling and straight-up gawdawful.
This. For two hours
Based on a 2014 graphic novel by Richard McGuire – the film has dozens of panel inserts in case you missed that tidbit – the story of mulitiple families unfolds here (get it?) in this one spot in… New York? Massachusetts? Beginning with dinosaurs ruling the earth, moving on to indigenous people, then colonisers/settlers – including Benjamin Franklin’s son. We get so see the forest cleared of its trees and a stately mansion go up across the street from the central house, eventually occupied by the Harters, an aviation pioneer and his wife (Gwilym Lee and Michelle Dockery), inventor Leo and his horny muse Stella (David Fynn and Ophelia Lovibond), and later on the Harrises, alias The Black Family (Nicholas Pinnock and Nikki Amuka-Bird) and don’t even start me on them. The main players, however, are WWII vet Al and Rose Young (Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly) and then their son and his wife, Forrest and Jenny Richard and Margaret (Tom Hanks and Robin Wright). For nearly two hours we watch the minor triumphs and tragedies that befall the Youngs through a lens pointed at the living room, with the passage of time marked by “major” events reported on from the television in the corner – The Beatles on Ed Sullivan, the Jane Fonda workout and so on. Stella dances around the living room when she vacuums in her negligee (seriously) while Leo works on the La-Z-Boy. Richard and Margaret’s daughter Vanessa bops around the same living room with the newfangled Walkman. The native couple we never get a name for crawl over the land in loincloths (put a chopstick in my eye, please). The Black Family – also unnamed – tell their son about traffic stops with cops because if it’s one thing Zemeckis “gets” it’s race relations. This is literally how your grandfather thinks younger people act.
Here was shot on a soundstage at Pinewood (hence the slew of Brit actors) using new generative artificial intelligence tech to (I believe) de-age the actors in-situ rather than post-production. The result is better than most deageing VFX but it’s still creepy AF, even if Hanks and Wright look slightly less dead-eyed than usual. But it doesn’t really matter, because their mannered performances sap the life out of any story regular Zemeckis screenwriter Eric Roth (Dune, Killers of the Flower Moon) may have shoehorned in. Here is stagey (duh) and inert, and entirely out of touch with even its own target demographic, never diving deep into any of the ideas it floats to take advantage of the benefit of hindsight. The film is at its strongest (and I use that term lightly) when it leans into Richard and Margaret’s conventional struggles, humanising them to a degree the visual flash and dash cannot. Bettany, heretofore a good actor, is the most aggrieved thanks to Zemeckis demanding a heightened, 1950s-style performance from him that clangs with, well, everything. There’s a hint he has a PTSD-induced drinking problem, but nothing comes of that nugget. Richard’s brother enlists in the Navy during the Vietnam War, which divides the family for exactly one scene. On it goes. You can count the engaging moments on one hand – one of which involves Hanks and Wright acting their age and regular DOP Don Burgess (who had the easiest shooting gig this year) finally turning the camera 180º, the other a toddler toppling face-first off a sofa. By all means come for the filmmaking experimentation, but I promise you’ll make it a whopping 15 minutes before your mind atrophies from the nothing sandwich of it all.