Written by Tom Augustine.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the ‘late-style’ era that we’re in, when the titans of cinema, nearing the tail-end of life, create work reflecting on what’s come before. Late style is nothing new in filmmaking, of course, but is usually framed in a negative light – Tarantino famously wishes to retire after ten films in order to avoid falling prey to it. In recent times, though, it’s come to be a defining arc of the modern cinescape, perhaps because only these established greats are currently receiving the funds and wriggle room to make truly original work at a large scale (well, most of them). It’s fair to say not all filmmakers have a late period worth remembering – Hitchcock being perhaps the most infamous – but a good number of modern day auteurs have found more success in that mode, at least critically. Paul Schrader famously reinvigorated (perhaps even perfected) his style with First Reformed, while Martin Scorsese turned in several astonishing masterworks in the last decade or so alone. Michael Mann, David Cronenberg, Clint Eastwood, Paul Verhoeven, Abel Ferrara, David Lynch, Steven Spielberg – I could go on. Recently I caught a deceptively excellent example of this phenomenon in William Friedkin’s final film, The Caine Mutiny Court Martial (which you should watch on Neon), a defiantly great film despite the many limitations set upon it, both creative and financial. Now in his seventies, Robert Zemeckis is another of these filmmakers, with a long and varied career behind him. Since The Polar Express, the American filmmaker’s work has been on a fairly sharp, steady decline (with occasional moments of relief, like the opening sequence of Flight). What has been most defining in this era of Zemeckis’ career has been just how unmoored it seems – from the sappy, half-assed literary adaptations (Pinocchio, The Witches) to the bizarre, uncanny misfires (Welcome to Marwen), with little to unify them beyond a general funk of poor quality.

Of all the Spielberg knockoffs, imitators and protegés, Zemeckis has arguably been the most successful, certainly commercially and, on average, even critically – let’s not forget Zemeckis was the man behind Cast Away and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, for example. Others like Joe Dante and M. Night Shyamalan might be the more interesting filmmakers, while the likes of Ron Howard, Chris Columbus and JJ Abrams might have a more solid batting average of generally likeable middlebrow pictures, but there’s only one Back to the Future. It can be easy, too, to discount Zemeckis in much the same way Spielberg has been dismissed, as the purveyor of cosy apple pie American idealism, conveniently leaving out the rangier, more dangerous corners of their filmographies like, say, The War of the Worlds or Death Becomes Her. Zemeckis is also a tech fetishist of the order of James Cameron and Peter Jackson – his work, most notoriously during his motion capture era that led to the ungodly spectacles of Beowulf and The Polar Express, is frequently as much about the technology on display as the film’s narrative content. 

Lamentably, the very worst tendencies of Zemeckis’ approach are on full display in Here, a film entirely lacking in subversiveness and imprisoned by its own devotion to a technological gimmick. The film it mostly closely resembles in tone and ideology, if not formal technique, is Forrest Gump, the film that earned Zemeckis and his cohort a raft of Oscars. That film’s odious barrage of saccharine neoconservativism and historical shortsightedness has its fair share of admirers, which is perhaps why the marketing of Here has touted the reunion of Zemeckis with that film’s stars, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright. With Here, Zemeckis seems intent on fusing the legacy of Forrest Gump to the modern era, which ensures that the same blind spots and jingoistic hubbub endures too. 

The gimmick at the heart of Here is drawn from the film’s source material, a graphic novel by Richard McGuire of the same name. It’s a concept that feels fresh and exciting in that format, and quite moving in execution. Every page provides a point of view from the same angle on a space, usually enclosed within a suburban house, in middle America. Maguire shuffles and remixes time from there, finding juxtapositions and intriguing contrasts by utilising small frames within the larger frame to depict what is happening at different points in time within the same space. The result is akin to what Andrei Tarkovsky called ‘sculpting in time’. Though he was referring to cinema’s unique ability to carve art out of time itself, there is nevertheless something of the same feeling in panels of the graphic novel (what is a storyboard, after all, but a comic strip?). Zemeckis uses essentially the same approach in the cinematic adaptation – a single camera angle that never moves, as characters pass before, behind and around us and time morphs and warps what the landscape looks like from this little corner of the world. It is a gimmick, but not one without merit – one can see how in the hands of the right filmmaker the notion Tarkovsky discusses could be made plain to the viewer, the central question the film explores being the flow of time itself. 

 

Billed as the reunion of the director and stars of Forrest Gump, Robert Zemeckis’ techno-gimmick Here squanders a promising concept and two titanic performers in this treacly, uninspired slice of old-school American cheese. Moments of inspiration clash unbearably with ill-considered and narrow-minded narrative choices, furthering Zemeckis’ current losing streak.

 

Sadly, the grandness of time’s march appears only useful to Zemeckis in telling well-worn stories of Boomer-friendly upwardly mobile suburban white people in the 20th Century, a sandbox the filmmaker is all too familiar with. Hanks and Wright play one of many generations of people, mostly middle class in a way that simply doesn’t exist anymore, who inhabit the house, which looks across the street to an old colonial mansion once inhabited by – who else in the American storybook could it be but him? – Benjamin Franklin. Among the other inhabitants are Hanks’ parents, played by Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly, a Wright Brothers-era airplane enthusiast and his statuesque wife, a cultured COVID-era black family with a Mexican housekeeper, and, bizarrely, the inventor of the La-Z-Boy and his lover. The less said about the brief flashes of the lives of indigenous Americans living on the same land well before the arrival of settlers, and the implications therein, the better. The drama of life – financial struggles, sudden deaths, illnesses, house damage, family spats, and so on – play out before us, weaving between these stories in a way that wears off quickly and never really reinvents itself. It’s an undeniably impressive technological trick, with Zemeckis occasionally finding dizzying ways of expanding the space – a late-breaking moment involving a mirror moving past the screen briefly recalls Contact’s most iconic moment – but for so much of Here one feels trapped by the perspective, rather than liberated. There’s a distancing effect to the approach, giving one the feeling of watching a filmed play with the occasional whiz-bang special effect. The drama remains cerebral – it’s nigh-on impossible to connect with the figures flowing in and out of the story both because of the way the film is rendered and the content of the story, which is so packed with bog-standard Zemeckis archetypes it makes Gump look positively nuanced. 

It’s perhaps Here’s most disappointing aspect – that so much of the drama feels so simplistic, both narratively and ideologically. The Boomerist nostalgia that drove Forrest Gump is present here too – hitting touchstones like the Vietnam war, Beatlemania, and basically every other American cultural signifier you can think of – without even a little subversiveness or genuine provocation. Gump’s predilection for stereotypes that would be harmful if they weren’t so boring are here too – the grand arc of the drama is weighed heavily in favour of Hanks and Wright’s uninteresting family struggles, while the indigenous American, black and Hispanic characters are given barely a look, and they’re usually there to die in some way or another. A scene of the black family (Nikki Amuka-Bird and Mohammed George) explaining the danger of cop stops to their teenage son is practically the only development these characters get, which is somehow more offensive than just not having black characters at all. Zemeckis’ outlook on the inherent lyricism of the progression of time is inherently tied to this old-world Americana, a discomfiting conceit of which the director seems entirely unaware. In a way, it is not dissimilar in theme to Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, with the key difference being that Malick possesses the soul of a poet, Zemeckis that of a carnival showman. Another filmmaker Here calls to mind, one I’ve spoken about before, is Swedish auteur Roy Andersson, whose singular, bleakly hilarious absurdism employs a similar diorama-like approach in the shooting. There’s more truth and soulfulness in a minute of Songs from the Second Floor than there is in the entirety of Here, a late-style misfire to throw on the heap of Zemeckis’ recent efforts.   

Here is in cinemas now.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE TRAILER

Here

Movie title: Here (Zemeckis, 2024)

Movie description: Billed as the reunion of the director and stars of Forrest Gump, Robert Zemeckis’ techno-gimmick Here squanders a promising concept and two titanic performers in this treacly, uninspired slice of old-school American cheese. Moments of inspiration clash unbearably with ill-considered and narrow-minded narrative choices, furthering Zemeckis’ current losing streak.

Date published: October 31, 2024

Country: United States

Author: Eric Roth, Robert Zemeckis, Richard McGuire

Director(s): Robert Zemeckis

Actor(s): Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Paul Bettany

Genre: Drama

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