Tom Hanks’s new film Here is a stilted, manipulative disaster
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Bold in theory but a struggle to sit through in practice, Robert Zemeckis’s experimental drama slingshots through time from a single perspective in the corner of a room. Robert Zemeckis’s ambitions make sense. They’re admirable, even. From Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) to Forrest Gump (1994), his career has repeatedly sought to discover how technology can be used to tell old stories in an entirely new fashion. But the quest backfires – and increasingly so in his run of uncanny valleys this century, among them The Polar Express (2004) and Pinocchio (2022) – when there’s a failure to ask how said technology informs the story being told, beyond simply allowing it to exist. In more simple terms, to quote a film by Zemeckis’s mentor Steven Spielberg: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”.
Here fits the bill perfectly. It’s bold in theory, a struggle to sit through in practice. The film is adapted from Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic novel, in which panels are layered over each other in order to depict an anonymous living room corner across time, as we become silent observers through decades and centuries of mundane incidents. It renders individual existence as small but precious.
Zemeckis replicates those panels-within-panels as a way to transition between scenes but without the graphic beauty of McGuire’s drawings. He may slingshot between eras – dinosaurs, the Lenni Lenape people pre-colonisation, the American Revolutionary War – yet we’re largely watching snippets from 20th- and 21st-century life play out in a static wide shot. For the most part, we’re stuck with the same family: Al Young (Paul Bettany), returning from the frontlines of the Second World War, his wife Rose (Kelly Reilly), their eldest son Richard (Tom Hanks), and his wife Margaret (Robin Wright), who first moves in after she becomes pregnant at the age of 18.
