Here

dir: Robert Zemeckis

2024

Just to be clear this isn’t the film called Here from last year directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright that tried to capitalise on people’s nostalgia not for the 1960s but for Forrest Gump in the 1990s. This is the Belgian flick about a Romanian guy in shorts who walks around looking at mosses and delivering soups.

Oh, no, wait, no, it IS the Zemeckis one from last year, sorry, sometimes it’s hard to keep track. With a de-aged Tom Hanks and a de-aged Robin Wright showing us what it would have looked like if Forrest and Jennie had shacked up instead for a couple of decades versus what actually happened...

It’s not really just about them. It’s based on a graphic novel by Richard McGuire called Here and it works within the conceit that our view or vantage point remains the same for the length of the movie, only changing twice for brief moments, showing what happens at a particular spot in what is now called Pennsylvania over thousands, hundreds or millions of years.

It doesn’t do it in a linear or chronological fashion. It does jump around a bit. There’s dinosaurs, mosses and meteors and presumably soup at certain points. A house is built in that spot, thankfully for our sake it’s the living room, and not the toilet or a broom cupboard, and we see the various residents of that very sturdy looking house over the decades as they have their various life dramas.

To some people the banalities and quotidian stuff will be like catnip, a cosy comfy balm. To others this will be a pointless and shamefully treacly schmaltzy mess with no reason to exist. Critics absolutely hated this film last year, and audiences did not flock to see Jennie and Forrest reunited. It was one of the most hated flicks from last year except for that one about Amy Winehouse, which I thought was unfairly maligned, and that one about Bob Marley, which I think was fairly maligned.

And to some extent I feel like this flick was a bit unfairly maligned too. It’s not great, it’s no masterpiece, and some of my time was spent wondering why the heck we were watching certain storylines (because they went seemingly nowhere). But overall it worked as something that shows the passage of time, the accumulation of history that permeates one spot in the cosmos, the echoes that carry through, the patina of time and joys and sorrows that remain, perhaps, on some metaphysical level, attached to these places where all the human emotions were experienced.

And yes there’s a lot of generic stuff that happens, or is shown: births lives sickness deaths, but they are the stuff of life, the same shit billions of us experience. That doesn’t make it automatically less meaningful, though your mileage is certainly going to vary as to whether you enjoy this film that captures those moments and pretty much only those moments and nothing else remotely interesting.

And, yes, there’s the jumping around in time stuff. It does compel you to think “there must be a reason why they’re showing this now”, and much of the time even if you get it, the most it should elicit from you is a shrug, not even an eyebrow raise, but a shrug nonetheless.

As an example, there’s a family that lives in the place in about the 1920s, I’m guessing, and the husband (Gwilym Lee) is obsessed with a newfound contraption that’s sweeping the nation, being the aeroplane. The wife (Michelle Dockery) is deathly afraid and only has dialogue where she expresses her conviction that her husband’s a fucking idiot and the plane will be the death of him.

You don’t foreshadow something like that without deciding there’s got to be some ironic sting in the tail. When the poor chap dies, it’s not because of the plane.

In the almost present, there’s an African-American family living in the place. Almost nothing seems that relevant. At one point the husband (Devon Harris) is giving his son The Talk, about how to behave if he’s pulled over by the cops if he wants to live, and it’s a pretty stern, draining moment, but it’s not clear what it’s got to do with anything else in the flick, thematically or otherwise. But then we get the connection – that family was living there in about 2020, and you’ll never guess what happened to their maid…

Mild connections over the eras. It’s hard not to think of the process as being one directed by a supernatural being, like, I couldn’t help but think of the David Lowery film from a bunch of years ago called A Ghost Story which had a ghost tied to a place in a location, but moving forwards and backwards through time. If so, as in that film, which I guess at the very least stands as a monument to thwarted desire, it’s not always clear why the “ghost”, or in this film’s case, the director, choses which moments to showcase, and why. Maybe the editor made all the tough decisions.

I tried to have no favourites, and yet there were some scenes that I liked or cared about more than others. There’s a married couple in the 1940s which has a chap obsessed with his invention of a mechanical reclining chair, and his supportive and excitable wife, and yes the gag is that he’s invented something that will eventually be in every other home across the demented United States, but I found it far more engaging when they were dancing, boozing, doing pin-up photography or taking the chair for a spin in a very different manner.

And then they’re gone, to California, once his invention takes off. I did not appreciate their absence. Please, come back, bohemian couple, you’re the only interesting people in the whole flick!

The main family is the worst, in the sense that, well, the story is the story that it is, but come on, really?

A man comes back from war (Paul Bettany). He is bitter and only gets more embittered as the flick goes on, seeing as he replicates entire scenes of pathetic failure from Death of a Salesman for our whatever is the opposite of amusement. Bemusement? He is shitty to his wife (the great Kelly Reilly, wasted in a thankless role of a 50s hausfrau who never emancipates herself, no thanks to Betty Friedan), he’s eventually shitty to his son (Tom Hanks!) Richard too.

He takes out his frustrations on his family and their nearests and dearests, and, yeah, okay, I know there are shitty parents in the world, and have been since time immemorial, but it was dull to watch, for me. The question I guess is meant to be whether Richard, who is clearly the stand in for the author of the graphic novel this was based on, turns into his shitty father or nah.

I cannot tell you how disconcerting it is to see de-aged Tom Hanks playing a teenager, or de-aged Robin Wright pretending to be his youthful girlfriend, and eventual wife. Their faces look so unnatural, but I guess that’s okay. Part of me wishes, however confusing it would have been for audiences, to have the actors as they look now playing those characters from a young age up to their dotage. That would have been radical, and brave. And cheaper, too.

There’s an artificial quality to what we’re watching, and it makes it feel like we’re watching something that is animated, artifice upon artifice, rather than an actual “live” action movie. Again, I has zero problem with that, though it is unnatural and unholy.

That couple, of Richard and Margaret, fuck on a couch in the lounge room, and everything else stems from that. Richard is a painter, and of course has no cents to his name, so when Margaret is pregnant at 18, he must do the same boring insurance selling job like his dad and put aside his hopes and dreams.

I am guessing that the flick is saying that’s a bad thing: when A Man puts aside the things he actually cares about and is good at, and works at a mundane job in order to feed and clothe himself and his family, it means The Man eventually gets resentful and depressed and The Woman eventually hates him for it because she’s squandered all her hopes and dreams in the interim as well. Now maybe that idea is something that has a certain amount of resonance for lots of people.

It's also pretty obvious, and pretty fucking lazy. I felt like at some point I was watching kids play with dolls in a diorama and replicate what they think adult arguments are like or what it is that parents have disagreements about or tension / animus over “Mommy says “Daddy, you’ve been hitting the sauce are bit too much lately, and staying out late with your secretary, when can we have a date night and where’s my mink coat?” and then Daddy says “Shut up and get me another drink, you’re uptight and boring, not like Aunt Pattie, she knows how to party. Plus you ruined my life!”

Hours and hours of fun as the kids bang the dolls against each other eventually. The arguments the central couple have, of the wife wanting her own place, and the husband worried that they can’t afford it for all these reasons, is so generic and so banal that it felt like such a waste of such an opportunity. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but Tom Hanks has been great in some movies, and Robin Wright is also a very accomplished actor, and has been for 40 years. Why couldn’t they have been given something interesting to do, something a bit meatier, eh?

Look, I’ll be the first to admit that, like most middle class middle aged people around the planet, I too live a life of quiet and sometimes tedious desperation, but I watch movies in order to be distracted from that fact for at least two hours. I certainly don’t watch movies to have the mundanity of the everyday rubbed in my face, reminding me how boring I would be to other people (but not to me: I do find myself endlessly fascinating, don’t you know?). Listening to a couple argue about getting a mortgage or a new place to live caused a small part of my soul to die. I was waiting for an argument to erupt about who didn’t put the toilet seat down or whether they were going to spend Christmas with his parents or her parents, for once. I mean I know they live out of state but just for once…

But I guess that’s part if not most of the point: along a long enough timescale, momentous and mundane things will happen at a place if it is observed forever. Nothing that bad persists forever, and nothing that joyous remains eternally either. People are born, people die. The only permanent thing is change, is impermanence, leaving behind a feeling of calm balance, equilibrium, peace.

Well, yeah. I guess. And some moments have ironies and synchronicities through the ages that the people around at those times won’t often appreciate themselves, but we, as either the storytellers or the audience will get to appreciate.

Good for us. This Here is okay, but it’s not much more than okay. And the nostalgic nod to Forrest Gump right at the end, with the fucking CGI hummingbird, made me roll my eyes so hard I wrenched something in my face, but no matter, I’ll soldier on.

6 times Tom Hanks through the ages is a gift to us all out of 10

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“You know, Richard said the other day how time flies, but Richard always says things like that, that are kind of obvious. And, you know, but it made me think when I was 30, if I thought about 50, I thought, "That is an awful long way away, and I don't really need to think about it," and... and then I blinked and I'm 50. That's crazy!” - Here