Here Review

A de-aged Tom Hanks and Robin Wright grabbed the headlines, but what’s going on behind closed doors in Robert Zemeckis’ “Here”?

He was Hollywood’s most loved director. During the ’80s and ’90s, everything Robert Zemeckis did turned to gold – Forrest Gump, Back To The Future, and Cast Away all brought critical and popular acclaim, and the box office returns to go with them – but as the 2000s arrived, it all went downhill. Radically. His fascination with mo-cap and computer animation, coupled with an increasingly sentimental tone, seemed out of step with the popular taste. The Polar Express started the downward slide, culminating in his live-action re-make of Pinocchio for Disney. It was a real low point.

The glimmer of a possible comeback was short-lived when his latest film, Here, was announced. The trailer revealed a heavily de-aged Tom Hanks and Robin Wright and there was no going back. Based on the graphic novel by Richard McGuire, the film focuses on the lives over the years of the occupants of a Colonial-style house in New Jersey. It stands on a site of historical significance, facing a mansion which once belonged to the Franklin family, but the camera’s main interest is the succession of people inside the smaller property. We watch them as the years move back and forth, the outside world changes and so does their personal one, with arrivals, departures, conflicts, celebrations, happiness, and sadness.

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The concept itself of Here is appealing. The audience watches through what feels like a two-way mirror: the families are oblivious of being observed and a split screen technique signposts each following scene, although it doesn’t always help with the confusing timeline. But the technique Zemeckis has chosen to tell his story is its biggest hindrance and distraction. This is, after all, a director who loves animation yet his decision not to make use of the original book’s distinctive style and, indeed, avoid it altogether, is impossible to understand. Instead, he’s become bogged down in some heavy-handed technology, changing the ages of his characters in a way that threatens to take our attention away from a portrait of what goes on behind closed doors and what the walls of any home witness over the years.

To its credit, the living room is constantly crammed with details – the wallpaper, the furniture, the colour schemes, the shows on the TV – but the physical distance created between the characters and the audience as they watch makes it hard to feel involved with any of them. There’s one exception, and that’s Al (Paul Bettany), who buys the house just after World War II and spends most of his life in jobs he hates purely to pay the mortgage and keep his wife Rose (Kelly Reilly) happy. Bettany, who is so often underrated, is excellent in the role of a husband and father struggling to do the right thing and often failing under the pressure.

If Here had stuck to the house’s saga and the lessons it teaches us, it would have stood more of a chance of connecting with its audience, despite its gooey sentimentality. But Zemeckis clearly had bigger – cosmic, even – ambitions, starting the film with CGI dinosaurs and the Ice Age before something approaching a landscape starts to emerge. It’s superfluous, as are the repeated returns to the past, and, coupled with the confusing narrative, the result is a film that hardly scratches the surface of its potential. With the director’s next project languishing in development hell – The King has been on the cards since 2018 – a comeback feels a long way off.

★★

In UK cinemas from 17th January / Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Paul Bettany, Kelly Reilly, Michelle Dockery, Gwilym Lee / Dir: Robert Zemeckis / Curzon Film / 12A