Here, review: Tom Hanks and Robin Wright’s disastrous reunion is an insult to being alive
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With its lead couple the victims of cringe-worthy de-ageing, Robert Zemeckis’s domestic drama is as manipulative as a fake séance. Copy link. twitter. facebook. whatsapp. Here plants itself in one square foot of American soil and never moves. Fashions change over decades; wall colours fluctuate; a dreadful mid-century sofa is replaced by a sofa bed. Many lives are lived in this living room.
Such was the conceit of Richard McGuire’s fêted 2014 graphic novel, an expansion of his 1989 underground comic. Now it is a film of sorts from the Forrest Gump creative team, every frame of which ought to make the author shudder with horror. The book had no main characters. For obvious commercial reasons, Robert Zemeckis and screenwriter Eric Roth have promoted Richard (Tom Hanks) and Margaret (Robin Wright) to function as such. This couple, who meet in the 1960s, see out practically their whole lives in Richard’s parental abode, trapped by reasons of real estate economics, not to mention family tragedy.
The site occupied wasn’t always suburban Pennsylvania. We briefly see dinosaurs tramp through, and the days when indigenous tribes camped there. But the bulk of this piece is a back-and-forth through the past 200 years of American life. McGuire used panels within panels to let timeframes co-exist on the page. Zemeckis copies the device so crudely, it’s as if we’re beholding a film in the constant process of defacing itself.
Logging on to a hectic Zoom call with the 20th century would be one thing, but the images are occluded hundreds of times by these floating pop-ups – say, of Benjamin Franklin’s relatives sitting in an antebellum carriage, or an inexplicably tacky First Nations funeral ceremony. The crude way it thereby “tackles” America’s foundation myths is mortifying.
