James Berardinelli review - **1/2 out of ****

https://www.reelviews.net/reelviews/here

For a movie like Here, which eschews the norms of narrative filmmaking in favor of something experimental, the first question to ask is whether the story, stripped bare of the director’s approach, is worth telling. The second question is whether the decision to approach the movie in a nontraditional fashion adds anything to the production. Providing an answer to the first question is more difficult than the second. At its heart, Here is a fairly straightforward melodrama and its strength comes from the accessibility and relatability of the characters and their circumstances. Most of us will have known (or been) these people at various times during our lives. Certain moments have a poignancy that comes from the connections formed between on-screen characters and those watching in the audience. But the biggest problems with Here are the extraneous plot elements that bog down the basic story (in order to advance a theme about impermanence), the ill-advised chronological dysfunction favored by Zemeckis, and the awkward, distracting use of frames to provide transitions. Although these things don’t destroy the film, they reduce its overall impact and emotional resonance. It’s difficult (if not impossible) to become immersed in a movie when the director is constantly reminding us that it is a movie.

The conceit is the same one evident in Richard McGuire’s source material, the graphic novel Here. But what works on the page doesn’t always translate to the screen and this is a case in point. The concept of making a movie with a camera in a fixed position as the years (and decades and centuries and millennia) go by has a certain appeal. It’s limiting, of course, but would allow the viewer to appreciate the passage of time. Unfortunately, Zemeckis isn’t content with this. He jumbles the chronology, abandoning linear filmmaking while employing the graphic novel’s use of frames to facilitate the transition from one time period to another. It doesn’t work. Not only is it occasionally disorienting but it keeps the viewer at arm’s length, never allowing one to settle into a scene before it is abruptly shifted – sometimes moving ahead by a matter of days or months and sometimes going back to the time of Ben Franklin or the indigenous population that roamed the land prior to the arrival of the Europeans..

Putting aside a cool scene depicting the end of the dinosaurs, the majority of Here focuses on the activities and events happening in the living room of a typical suburban house over the course of nearly a century. The story follows four families although one gets a lion’s share of the screen time. That family is the Youngs, whom we follow across two generations spanning the time from post-World War II, when Al and Rose Young (Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly) move in and start having children, to the early 2010s when Richard (Tom Hanks), Al and Rose’s eldest son, and his wife, Margaret (Robin Wright), move out. The 70-year period in which the house is owned by the Youngs represents roughly 70% of its existence and therefore consumes about 70% of the 104-minute running time.

The central character is the living room with its ever-shifting décor and furniture. Outside the bay window, we see a big colonial house across the street (once inhabited by Ben Franklin’s illegitimate son, William), which remains a constant as the seasons change around it. (The location of the house is never specified but the scenes featuring Franklin and his family would most likely place it in New Jersey, where William was the last colonial governor from 1763 until 1776). Inside, the room undergoes the kind of changes one might expect. A radio is replaced with a primitive b&w TV set, then a bigger color console, an early flat-screen, and finally a modern wall-mounted unit.

The human focal point is Richard, who grows up in the house as part of a nuclear family, gets his girlfriend pregnant when they’re 18, is married in the living room, and continues to live with his parents well into middle age when his father gives him the house. Richard’s life passes through all the usual milestones, including the difficulties of parenting an only child and losing both of his parents. There’s nothing special about him but that’s the point. Here wants to depict the everyday life of an historically anonymous person and, stripping away the distractions created by the movie’s artificial structure, it mostly accomplishes that goal.