Robert Zemeckis’s time-hopping drama Here may be flawed, but it still dares to experiment in ways most modern movies don’t.
In theory, the 2024 drama Here is of a piece with several other movies by director Robert Zemeckis. Like Back To The Future and Forrest Gump, it plays around with the flow of time to weave a soft-focus yarn about relationships and the history of America. Like Death Becomes Her and The Polar Express, it makes novel use of cutting-edge digital technology; in Here, a combination of techniques (AI deep fakery and so forth) were used to bring to the screen a de-aged Tom Hanks and Robin Wright.
Beyond all that, though, Zemeckis sets himself a further stylistic challenge. In adapting Richard McGuire’s graphic novel, the filmmaker tells his story from a single, fixed position. Not just the Benjamin Franklin-era house that changes decor as the decades unspool, but from one spot in one room, the lens fixed on its furnishings and the leafily mundane view through the window.
It’s a bold-sounding limitation that immediately sweeps away the tricks and techniques that have formed the basis of storytelling for over a century. With his camera attached to a tripod – its three legs seemingly bolted to the floor – Zemeckis can’t cut to different angles or close-ups to emphasise an emotion or reveal some new piece of information about its house or its occupants.
With its locked-off camera and single viewpoint, Here could in theory have unfolded like a piece of theatre, positioning its audience a few inches away from the living room which forms the drama’s stage. But rather than conform to the time-worn trappings of a play, Zemeckis and co-writer Eric Roth instead do something else: they constantly phase backwards and forwards in time, the shifts signposted by picture-in-picture thumbnails of a forthcoming era. Stylistically, it could be seen as an evolution of the montage-like split-screen effect seen in director Richard Fleischer’s The Boston Strangler (1968) or TV thriller series, 24. (Less charitably, it could also be described as the tricksy flourish you get in adverts for banks or mobile phones.)
This effect means that we’re shown a young Tom Hanks hugging his baby one moment, only for the image to gradually dissolve to a shot of Native Americans standing on the same spot (before the house was built) a century or so earlier, all gazing at a full moon. In storytelling terms, Here is therefore an intriguing mix of old and new: the fixed perspective of the stage is crossed with the reality-bending possibilities of CGI, where a scene can merge seamlessly from one epoch to the next.
It’s in that tension between the formal and the experimental, however, that the tears begin to show in Here’s fabric. Its plot tells the life and changing times of the Young family, beginning with Paul Bettany’s uptight war veteran Al, who buys the New Jersey pile with his wife Rose (Kelly Reilly) in the wake of WWII. The couple then have three kids, one of whom grows up to become Tom Hanks’ Richard, whose dreams of becoming an artist are literally cast away when he and his future wife Margaret (Robin Wright) start a family of their own.
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The Young family’s story is bookended by those of the house’s owners before and afterwards: the budding aviator who owned the place in the early 1900s; the inventor and pin-up model who cluttered the place up in the 1920s, and the middle-class family – complete with maid – who move in at some point after the millennium. In his 100-minute trip across time, Zemeckis also stops to take in the extinction of the dinosaurs and the construction of the house in the 19th century. (A climactic scene where the house is destroyed by a climate change-induced tidal wave was shot but ultimately went unused, though you can see it in this Corridor Crew episode).
The problem with all of Zemeckis’ temporal cross-cutting is that it only serves to distance the audience from the drama. Having already denied himself cinema’s conventional photographic and cutting techniques, he also takes linear storytelling off the table: Here’s scenes unfold like a string of vignettes that have some loose visual or thematic connection to the next. Each scene is also quite short – some lasting only a few seconds or so – meaning we’re constantly lurching from one era to the next, with little time afforded to build a connection to the characters’ inner lives.
It’d be a bit like watching a theatre production where new set pieces are constantly being pushed and pulled off the stage, and where actors rush on and recite a few lines before they’re ushered off by the next set of players. Almost as damaging is Zemeckis’ reliance on digital effects and blue screen to compose each shot. For much of the film, the actors appear to perform in front of a blue screen, with the house background composited in after the fact. This, along with the aforementioned digital de-ageing (and, later, ageing) gives Here an uncanny valley feel that constantly undercuts its slice-of-life premise.
Here is therefore something of a failed experiment; a film that deconstructs and challenges the conventions of cinema, but at the expense of its human drama.
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Flawed though it is, Here at least tries something new. A recent counterpoint, perhaps, is The Electric State on Netflix – a straight-to-streaming film that nevertheless attempts to ape the scope and conventions of mainstream cinema, right down to its Marvel-sized budget of $320m, if reports are accurate. If anything, The Electric State feels like a parody of a generic Hollywood blockbuster: effects-driven, filled with stock characters and quips, and underpinned by a broad moral message calibrated to offend precisely no one.
Considering how much investors’ cash such companies as Netflix and Amazon have, it’s surprising how rarely they commission work that experiments with the conventions of film and TV. To date, Netflix hasn’t thrown its money at anything quite as ambitious as Charlie Brooker’s interactive Black Mirror episode, Bandersnatch, for example. Director Philip Barantini’s four-part series Adolescence pushed at the boundaries of traditional TV, not just in its one-shot format, but also in the way its episodes each tell a connected yet self-contained story revolving around the same subject. Sadly, projects as bold as Adolescence are heavily outweighed by reality TV or true crime documentaries, both on Netflix and other streaming services.
Here may not work on its own terms. But perhaps, from an artistic standpoint, it’s better to attempt something new and stumble rather than follow conventions and create something generic and forgettable. Filmmakers probably won’t rush to replicate Robert Zemeckis’s experiment, but they could still learn a thing or two from his willingness to go out on a creative limb.
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