Tom Hanks and Robin Wright reunite with Robert Zemeckis

There’s something quintessentially American about conducting a multi-generational study centered around the living room, straight out of Norman Rockwell. The ideal theme of home and family is enhanced by scenes around the Christmas tree and dining table, perfectly expanded to accommodate the ever-expanding clan. At Thanksgiving. But being relatable doesn’t necessarily mean it’s funny, even if moments of joy don’t hide the veins of sadness and disappointment running through them.

So is the idea of ​​photographing everything from prehistoric times to modern times, from the same fixed point and with the same wide angle. In terms of technical craft, this is a bold experiment, but perhaps less oriented towards a dynamic narrative than an art installation. No matter how many times you squeeze closer to the lens to emphasize important moments in your life, narrowing the frame limits your storytelling.

Director Robert Zemeckis reunites with Forrest Gump screenwriter Eric Roth, stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, and takes visual cues from Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic novel of the same name. It is an expansion of a six-page manga published in 2014. 80’s.

This multidisciplinary artist pushed the boundaries of the comic book format by sticking to the exact same position in every panel. His story, set in the living room of a house built in 1902, spans thousands of years, but focuses primarily on the 20th and 21st centuries. Most of these panels contain one or more small panes that display the same space at different non-chronological points in time.

By recreating a graphic novel approach in three dimensions, Zemeckis’ films resemble living dioramas with insets that provide windows into the past and future. From a purely craft perspective, it has been fascinating and even beautiful for some time. Until it doesn’t.

Zemeckis has been obsessed with technology and its visual capabilities for years, to the point where he ignores the rudiments of story and character development. The episodes here frequently return to the same family at different moments in their lives, but they rarely stick around long enough to maintain narrative momentum or add depth to the characters.

In addition to the self-imposed rigor of the visual scheme, Here will draw attention to another technological element that is even more distracting, perhaps in a way that polarizes opinion. The director used VFX studio Metaphysic’s generative AI tools to rejuvenate Hanks and Wright as Richard and Margaret, whose trajectory from high school to old age is central to the film. The program uses archival images of actors to spit out digital makeup, allowing the cast to swap faces during a performance.

This is more sophisticated and convincing than the de-aging in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman five years ago, especially since the physical properties of the actors’ bodies don’t always match up perfectly. In the case of teenage Hanks, elasticity and facial expression have improved. year. But there’s also something inherently creepy about this process, especially at a time when many of us are concerned about movie actors taking an increasingly impersonal digital path.

The movie begins with a house under construction. It introduces the concept of paine, which depicts how different elements fit together, with furniture from different eras and the first glimpses of people expressing different threads, which are detailed throughout. explained, but some are more essential than others. The opening scene also plants the central idea of ​​Roth and Zemeckis’ screenplay: home as a container for memory, both lived experience and history.

The frame then travels back in time to a time when the area was a primitive swamp filled with dinosaurs. Until the landscape is destroyed by a violent mass extinction, first forming rocks and gradually becoming a lush glade filled with flora and fauna (CG). There, two young Native Americans (Joel Ouellette and Danny McCallum) share a kiss, before jumping back in time to reveal enslaved people building a colonial-era mansion.

We get snippets of life in the house at different times. Pauline (Michelle Dockery) is an anxious wife and mother in the early 20th century, afraid that her husband John’s (Gwilym Lee) obsession with aviation will end in tragedy. Leo (David Finn) and Stella (Ophelia Lovibond) live in the house for 20 years starting in the mid-1920s. Unencumbered by their children, they are a fun and cheerful pair of pseudo-bohemians who get lucky with Leo’s recliner invention. Their levity would have been more welcome in a movie where seriousness tends to be a burden.

The least developed is the home, which was purchased in 2015 by parents Devon (Nicholas Pinnock) and Helen Harris (Nicki Amuka-Byrd) and their black teenage son Justin (Cash Vanderpuy). The family is considering an asking price of $1 million. “It’s stealing.”

Their presence helps show how neighborhoods evolve and become more inclusive. But there is a nagging feeling that the role of the Harris family in particular is largely representational. That’s especially true in the most fleshed-out scene, where Devon and Helen sit Justin down and have a serious discussion about the rules he must follow to stay safe if he’s stopped by a cop while driving. . Their scenes also touch on the terrifying first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, through the fate of a longtime Latina housekeeper (Anya Marco-Harris).

But most of the story focuses on Richard’s family, starting with his parents Al (Paul Bettany) and Rose (Kelly Reilly), who bought the house in 1945. Al is fresh out of the Army and is suffering from an undiagnosed condition. I drink alcohol because of my PTSD. Having grown up in the aftermath of the Great Depression, he worries about money, fearing that his job as a salesman will not be enough to support him.

Richard, the eldest of four children (played by a young actor until Hanks intervenes), brings his high school sweetheart Margaret home to meet his family. When she reveals that she plans to go to college first and then law school, Al asks, “What’s wrong with being a stay-at-home mom?” When Richard, an avid painter, revealed that he wanted a career as a graphic artist, he was even more candid: Get a job where you can wear a suit. ”

Richard and Margaret marry at the age of 18 after she becomes pregnant. Richard packs up his paints and canvases, nodding emphatically at his sons who melancholy follow in their father’s footsteps. He works in insurance sales to support his family, but his parents continue to live together. Margaret never settles in a house that doesn’t feel like her own, causing serious problems in her marriage. However, Richard also inherited his father’s financial fears, which prevents them from taking risks in their own places.

I’d like to say I empathize with the changes this family goes through, all freed from the most mundane of plans: aging, declining health, death, divorce, and, most insistently, dreams of postponement. At times it feels like it has been taken away by the family. Next generation. At Margaret’s 50th birthday party, Wright gives a depressing speech about all the things he wanted to accomplish by that age and gets stuck. It feels like a pale shadow of Patricia Arquette’s similar, and far more economically articulated, scenes from Boyhood.

Of the many moments when characters say something important to the camera, the most embarrassing is Richard’s foreshadowing mission during Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Our House” It may be referred to as “a moment that we will always remember.” Plays on the soundtrack. This feels like something straight out of a Saturday Night Live sketch.

For those with long-standing ties to Forrest Gump, watching Hanks and Wright reunite and influence the characters’ endings may be enough to captivate them. But others are likely to remain stubbornly dry-eyed, despite Alan Silvestri’s syrupy score stirring emotions.

For a film that covers such a vast swath of American life, Here feels strangely weightless. It’s not the actors’ fault; they all play characters that are merely outlines. No one can completely break free from their obsession with film’s visual technology, even at the cost of their souls.

When British Loyalist William Franklin (Daniel Betts) is conveniently parked in a horse-drawn carriage and complains to his wife about the radical politics of his father Benjamin (Keith Bartlett), history takes a sudden detour back to the colonial era. . (The less said about the cut of Richard and his brother dueling Benjamin Franklin at a costume party, the better.) There is a brief scene from the Revolutionary War. And there are broad descriptions of pre-settlement life, where Indigenous couples raise families and struggle with their own losses.

But episodic writing is characteristic of no opportunity to elaborate on themes in overly conventional detail, no overly clichéd dialogue, and even the Native American plot is tied with a neat ribbon. It happens when a member of the Archaeological Society stops by, suspects that the house is built on an important location, and asks to explore the garden a bit. Look…

Only at the very end does cinematographer Don Burgess’ camera move from its fixed point in the living room, exiting the house and taking in the orderly suburbs that surround it. But an obviously fake CG hummingbird is a final reminder that almost everything in Here is synthetic.