Arts & Culture

Where: In theatres
What: Movie, 104 minutes.
When: Fri., Nov. 1
Genre: Drama
Rating: NN (out of 5)
Why you should watch: Director Robert Zemeckis’s use of CGI to” Benjamin Button” his stars, make them younger, is pretty cool in an otherwise dull film.

ROBERT ZEMECKIS IS  notable as a director for, among many things, his use of new technologies that change how bodies appear on screen. Although his films are usually mainstream, feel-good fare, the way he portrays humans is often uncanny (think of the way bodies stretch and transform in Death Becomes Her or The Witches) or downright unsettling (Polar Express and A Christmas Carol, whose CGI figures became the epitome of the uncanny valley phenomenon where a representation of a person gets so close to real life but falls eerily short). Here may seem like a return to the sentimental dramas that cemented him in Hollywood history, with the decades-spanning Americana reminiscent of Forest Gump and the very human longing of Contact and Cast Away, but Here’s premise, and the technology used to accomplish it, firmly places the film in the uncanny category.

Based on the 2014 graphic novel of the same name by Richard McGuire, Here takes place in a single room — a living room, to be precise — in a modest house in a Pennsylvania suburb (across the street, for some reason, from a colonial mansion that once belonged to Benjamin Franklin). While most of the film revolves around three generations of the Young family, there are also scenes from 2020, the turn of the 20th century, the early ’40s, an unspecified pre-colonization era and as far back as the Jurassic period. The Youngs are a typical nuclear suburban family; their lives run the gamut from warm holiday dinners to the cold reality of dashed dreams. Al (Paul Bettany) and Rose (Kelly Reilly) buy the house after he returns from the war. As they grow older, Al succumbs to his drinking habit, and Rose shrinks under her husband’s dismissive words and her shrivelled ambitions. Their eldest child, Richard (Tom Hanks), meets a similar fate after his girlfriend, Margaret (Robin Wright), becomes pregnant at 18, their dreams deferred by the pressures of parenthood.

The camera stays firmly in one angle, the disparate lives on the plot of land overlapping through boxes within the frame, like windows opening up on the past. This is a direct adaptation of the graphic novel, which uses the basic building block of the form, the panel, to create gorgeous juxtapositions in time. But while McGuire drew the periods in different styles, with distinct textures and colour tones, Zemeckis shoots all the eras in the same look — and it’s a boring one. The scenes are lit brightly and directly, probably to accommodate all the digital effects employed here. Most notable is an AI technology that de-ages the actors during production. The result is distracting: whenever the actors are close to the camera, they look a little fuzzy and unreal. Even the pleasant scenes outside the room’s bay window have the look of a bad green screen.

There could have been an interesting tension between the wholesome Norman-Rockwell-esque stories and the textureless, artificial technology. But it’s too bad that the script is so derivative you may suspect AI also had a hand in writing it (for example, in the early 1900s timeline, a wife sits in front of her husband’s casket wailing, “Why, John? Why?”) The unmoving camera could be a fresh and innovative formal concept, but with the stilted dialogue and middle-class concerns, it gives off the impression of a bad play. I won’t deny that the film got an emotional reaction from me a few times. Judging by the sniffling in the audience, it will get to others, too. I think this is largely because of Wright’s performance, which carries most of the emotional weight of the story.

The film feels conservative, not exactly for its family values ethos (although the families in the film are overwhelmingly straight and nuclear, the only couple that seems happy is the one that doesn’t have kids) but because it is so stuck in the past. Unlike the graphic novel, Zemeckis does not bring us into the future, only addressing the present moment or the recent past. Even the nods to recent history, like social distancing during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic or a Black couple telling their son how to get out of being pulled over by police without being killed, come across more as clunky cultural flashpoints than explorations of contemporary daily life. I couldn’t help but think about Tree of Life (2011) or A Ghost Story (2017), two films that use a suburban home as the locus of a cosmic exploration of love, family and time. The restricted nature of the formal experiment should give us an expansive view of time and place, of all the ways that we are united through time by the joys and pains of life. But whether it’s from the overuse of digital technology or its deeply conventional take on human relationships, Here fails to transcend its own four walls.