Time just went

HERE

2024

Directed by Robert Zemeckis

Written by Eric Roth and Robert Zemeckis (based on the comic book by Richard McGuire)

Spoilers: maybe high, more like inapplicable

Note: runs slightly long, but it was the most movie of 2024, whether we treated it that way or not

There are a couple of facts, though I guess they're more like my opinions, concerning Robert Zemeckis, that aren't a huge part of the conversation about the filmmaker and may not even be widely perceived, but I think are pertinent to Here: the first is that formal experimentation, and formal control, have been of great importance to the director, and while that's more obvious in terms of his pioneering special effects movies (Back To the Future Part II, in particular, has a fair amount of resonance with Here) and, later, his motion capture cartoons, I think it's just as vital to his movies where it's less obvious, like his two very famous dramas with Tom Hanks, Forrest Gump and Cast Away.  The second fact, or opinion—in this case, even "interpretation"—is that Zemeckis is a more melancholic dude than it seems at first blush, and there's a substantial current in his filmography (Forrest Gump and Cast Away, but also Contact and more recently Welcome To Marwen) that circle around something like the same depressive mood, regarding how things turn out as they do, rather than how you think they should, not necessarily badly—there's a sort of strained hopefulness in most of those movies, as well as in Here—but the basic thrust of these films is that while there might be a power behind things, and there might even be what you'd call a plan, your happiness is not the goal of that plan, and what contentedness you can scrape out from it is largely up to you, though if even that's possible, it's still because you're both lucky and wise.  "Life is like a box of chocolates" is banal, like "the sun will rise" is banal, but, get this, life is pretty banal.  Zemeckis has a certain genius at finding, or creating, the places where the banal and magical meet.

These talents have a tendency to get obscured by Zemeckis's general late career problems.  Some of the reasons for this are unfair, for example the never-ending 21st century backlash to Forrest Gump, for reputedly being of no value besides "Boomer nostalgia."  Some are less unfair, particularly regarding Zemeckis's quixotic obsession with high technology, reflected in all those uncanny-looking mocap cartoons he made whilst James Cameron calmly ate his lunch.  (Marwen is the only one where it works, because it's supposed to be uncanny there.)  And Here, of course, got it from both barrels: its main phase is also trafficking in that greatest of sins, "Boomer nostalgia," and it was shot by the same guy as Forrest Gump, Don Burgess, and scored by the same guy, Alan Silvestri, and co-written by the same guy, Eric Roth, and it stars the same guys, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, and Wright's role in Zemeckis and Roth's screenplay is likewise apt to be reduced (disingenuously) to a lifetime's worth of punishment for daring to express a modest yearning for feminine agency; meanwhile, Hanks and Wright have been de-aged with supercomputers.  I strongly suspect that Here would've been better-received if it had hired two late 20-something actors and put them in age makeup instead.  This is particularly the case when Wright and Hanks still look like late 20-somethings at their youngest even behind the AI process, which isn't unimpressive, though they're supposed to be 18.

The de-aging, anyway, is by an enormous margin the least interesting formal experiment going on in Here.  (The most impressive part of it is that Hanks, either via his own efforts or via tech, sounds credibly young; but to put it somewhere because I would otherwise lose track, Here strikes me as a difficult challenge for the sound workers, and it's triumphant except for that one affrontively terrible piece of ADR on Zsa Zsa Zemeckis* that sounds like she's speaking through a dimensional portal that's also somehow right above your head.)  Anyway, although I'm not certain that presenting itself as a companion piece to Forrest Gump was in this movie's favor, nor am I remotely convinced it would've been better without Hanks and Wright.

And, ahem, that's all I've got to say about that.

So that's a lot of preface before getting to what Here is, and, hypothetically, that's an adaptation of Richard McGuire's 2014 comic book Here, a long-gestating, fifty-fold expansion of a six-page comic short story McGuire did all the way back in 1989 (that was, itself, adapted as a threadbare student film in 1991).  I say "hypothetically," even though there are notions that are adapted verbatim from McGuire's Here, because his 1989 "Here" was just an idea for a comic book, and that didn't change much.  That idea, anyway, concerns the simultaneity of time, and, philosophically-speaking, that's the same thing as saying it's about a deterministic universe where everything is a consequence of what came before, with humans living lives they cannot change.  (So is Zemeckis's Here a late-life apology for all the bullshit that greased Back To the Future's time travel wheels?  Could be!)  Or if that's not really descriptive, then it's an exploration of that idea through an unusually austere deployment of comics form, using a single angle on a single location (it's not, of course, a single location in spacetime, but let's try not being pedantic), where is built in 1907 a house; it uses a mosaic panel structure, all from that same angle, to peer through time at the people who lived in that house, as well as into the woodland before it was built, and the wetland and museum that exists after it, and the blank space before there was life on the planet at all.

So it's cosmic, but also chilly, especially if you saw the movie first (I suppose I could imagine a fan of the comic arriving upon the movie and finding it offensively melodramatic).  More objectively, then, it doesn't tell a story, and isn't concerned with investing you in, or even attaching identities or personalities to, the various humans occupying its space.  It kind of can't be: at least in the form it takes (extremely abstract backgrounds and figurework, and a near-total inability to present involved, prolonged dialogues or action), it's surprisingly low-density in its informational payload, and not purely as a function of medium, either (the movie has voices and real or photoreal faces, but that's not half the difference).  I could probably stop with "I don't think the comic bothers providing anyone a name, except for William Franklin, the Governor of New Jersey, who lived across the street that didn't exist yet, in the 1700s."  (The comic has a lot of errata in it, but also practically acknowledges that it's not providing strong visual or narrative guidance: every single Goddamn panel has a year legend.  The movie's tighter focus, and Ashley Lamont's production design, remove the need for such clutter.)

The film uses a different single angle, too: the comic's is more geometrically pristine, and aligned with the physical properties of the book; it sets the camera near the center of the living room to face a corner defined by the center of each two-page spread; the movie is, frankly, a lot more damned awkward-looking.  The camera is placed in the left side of the room, almost-not-quite perpendicular to the front wall, and is weirdly high up, so we're also somewhat looking down on the room.  It would be a mildly bad shot anywhere else, and it's this entire movie.  (Somehow it's a bad shot even when the house the room is in doesn't exist yet, and it's just a forest.  It's possibly only a sensibly-framed shot when the house is still being built, and we're staring down into its basement.)

But go watch a play from a slightly-suboptimal seat, and tell me how that's framed (for Here does have a most playlike mien).  It's well-designed (assuming, arguendo, that the camera ain't going to be moving) to tell the stories taking place in this room, and, usually, to tell numerous stories at once.  That angle is always jam-packed with information, even before we get into the informational overload of the film's other, bigger conceit, its splitscreen technique.  The camera's high, for instance, so that we can pretty much always see through the window and across the street, and that backdrop is pretty amazing, just as a matter of deep staging (albeit achieved via digital compositing, though Burgess's photography within the room is nice and deep, too).  What's oddest about the differences between mediums is that the comic isn't as good at being what a comic already is: comics are good at doing simultaneity by default, because they're already stacks of time—as Alan Moore has repeatedly shown us, and which you can easily determine by holding one in your hands—while movies are durational experiences.  So if Zemeckis did nothing else with Here, though I think once he does it, almost everything else about it works by an inevitability, it's that he convinces you—hell, he just shows you—that time is happening all at once.  Memory is kind of like that, too, as is history.  So even if these are little lives full of little moments, each one is important.  The mystery of a lost ribbon is of utmost importance—but ultimately only as important as the end-Cretaceous, or your mother's stroke.

I'm still prefacing.  So: Zemeckis and Roth's script is, mostly, an original story.  (The exception is, again, the material regarding William Franklin's (Daniel Bett's) thorny relationship with his traitorous father.  Zemeckis and Roth also leave stuff out: it's a hugely reasonable choice, though I'd have still wanted them to go that last inch after going a million miles, and incorporate future-set scenes, too.)  The film begins in what I believe we must identify as Willingboro Township, NJ**, in approximately 66,000,000 B.C.,*** and it races through its prehistoric timelapse until it arrives at the modern era.  We don't ever go back to the dinosaurs (I also rate this as a bummer), but we soon establish the seven couples to whom Here's cyclic storytelling-through-the-ages is dedicated: a pair of Lenape (Joel Oulette and Dannie McCallum) in what the comic said was the 1610s, who frequently venture out to this corner of the forest; in the 1770s, the aforementioned William Franklin and his wife (Leslie Zemeckis, so a real family affair), for whom this is their front yard; in the 1910s, John and Pauline Harter (Gwilym Lee and Michelle Dockery), the house's first purchasers, and the former an aviation enthusiast; in the 1930s, Lee and Stella Beekman (David Fynn and Ophelia Lovibond), a freewheeling pair, the former of whom invents the La-Z-Boy recliner (a wildly ahistoric but enjoyable counterpoint because they're the only just-plain-happy people in this whole movie****); in the 2000s, Devon and Helen Harris (Nicholas Pinnock and Nikki Amuka-Bird) and their housekeeper Raquel (Anya Marco Harris); and, circling back, in the 1940s et seq, veteran Al Young (Paul Bettany) and his homemaker wife Rose (Kelly Reilly), who beget (amongst others) the main show here, Richard (Hanks), who knocks up Margaret (Wright), requiring each partner to abandon their individual aspirations.  They wind up living for years and years with Richard's parents, until such time as Margaret's accumulated resentments towards her life, focused upon if not altogether caused by Richard's economic fears, come to a head.

These are almost all good or great little stories—the Young family saga is obviously the heart of it, and while the others are capable of freestanding independence, they exist mostly as commentary, and somewhat as comic relief, though even when they're funny (though the movie is very funny even with the Youngs), it's an invitation to compare them to the Youngs.  (The Harter wife's constant worries about flying machines—not unbelievable, but would that not be at least borderline harpyish by the late 1910s?—is obviously in conversation with Richard's worries about money, especially given that the Harter husband eats it from influenza, so that in the end all his pursuit of aviation meant was that he got to live fully while he was still alive.)  The very, very obvious flaw in Zemeckis and Roth's mechanism comes with the Harrises: I think if you were ungenerous you could accuse the indigene couple of a certain elemental flatness, but they are, at least, elemental, their frolics representing the life, love, and death of any human existence (and not so unspecifically, either—one of the hardest-hitting four-dimensional echoes the movie ever gets up to, harder-hitting perhaps because it's never too stressed, is how we watch a huge rock in Franklin's yard get smashed to pieces by slaves, only to rather later determine that this was the indigene man's favorite sitting rock); but while everyone else gets business, comic and tragic and socially-framed, but always individualized, the Harrises get little besides "be black, middle-class style."  Their single longest sequence is Devon giving their kid the Black Family Cop Talk, and their only real function is to be "the family that comes after."  (They also have a completely implausible living room arrangement.  It's really crazy, two couches, facing one another, perpendicular to their television.)

As for everything else, it is verging on perfect.  To add a little bit to "story" on behalf of a movie that is much more about how its story's told, I really love the intergenerational domestic drama that unfolds in the center of it, especially in this treatment: the elder Youngs have a very bittersweet arc—in short, Al is a fucking asshole, then he is less so, when it's basically too late—which is somewhat repeated with their son and daughter-in-law, though a lot more messily because Richard isn't an asshole, or if he is then Richard and Margaret are both assholes.  Each are irrational, and if Margaret is more obviously so, at least she's comprehensibly so—when the house is given to them, and they get the home to themselves at last, that might be what makes her angriest of all, because all it's doing is condemning her to keep living inside this hateful palace of memory.

But what makes it wondrous is, like I said, the form it takes.  Now, it will take you a spell to get used to its oddness, and because of its form, it has an unseemly need to hit you with a cumbersome amount of data right away, delivered by of way of some incredibly clumsy blocking around the quasi-proscenium to ensure the actors' faces stay in your brain, while they recite some amazingly arch and hyper-expository dialogue.  These factors mostly recede once they've done their job.  If a lot of this script remains pretty darned arch, that's countervailed by Wright and Hanks (and Reilly and Bettany) being splendidly delicate with it, and for the remaining performers, that archness is part of the pleasure anyway.  I have not said that this is a hugely corny movie, but I think you probably picked that up; if you didn't, Silvestri's score will let you in on that secret.  (It's a great score, and infinitely manipulative in telling you how to feel, as it should be, given the parameters of the project.)

But it is also something that, even with restraint, I'd still have to describe as "the best editing of the century," though restraint is pointless when it comes to the specific technique, and it almost makes me feel dizzy how comfortable I am calling it "the best splitscreen collage of all time."  (It flabbergasts me that editor Jesse Goldsmith had practically never previously edited a movie; it also annoys me that I can't find a single screencap of it.)  But that editing is the foundation of this film, anyway, even more than its single angle conceit.  Its usual transition goes something like this: a gray-bordered rectangular window quick-fades in, and show us a different time, sometimes within the same story and sometimes centuries apart, and sometimes joined by extra windows, or the entire frame, but by no means always.  There's an enormous fuckton of variation away from this baseline: for example, there are occasionally temporal overlaps within what we're watching in "real time" (notably Margaret's birth-giving sequence); there's a bizarre one that cuts away the walls so we can see the doorstep; and there's one, which is frankly the dumbest thing in the movie, though I still laughed with delight at it, that uses a mirror in one frame to reflect into the adjoining kitchen in another time period.  Importantly, there's still great variation even when it's doing (its version of) "normal": the quick-fades do not occur at the same rate, and sometimes they're boisterous, or importune, and sometimes they're hesitant, or mournful; there is, always, tremendous sensitivity to the needs of each transition.  This holds true for how much of the frame any of these panes occupy at any given point.  For such a locked-down aesthetic, there's an astoundingly huge space of potential within its limits.  (This may be a metaphor in its own right.)  It is not religious about forcing you to find interrelationships across its sudden discontinuities, and as noted sometimes it requires you to put things together across minutes (and centuries); but they are usually there.  (But then, there are also the moments where it punches you squarely in the chest; I'm thinking of one with the elder Youngs, separated across forty-odd years, in particular.)  This is not even considering its final shot in a symbolically-emptied house, and perhaps the only true spoiler I could provide for Here is that, in the final shot, the camera moves—though you probably guessed what it'd be, as soon as I said, "final shot."

It is overwhelming at times, in fact most of the time, though of course it should be: being overwhelming is the essence of splitscreen.  (I may regret not seeing this in theaters more than any other film in my whole life; at a minimum, this was the most absolute "I legitimately need a big-ass screen to see the details of the performances in the back of this eternal medium-long shot" big screen experience of 2024.)   If I call this the best splitscreen ever, though, it's not just because it's so good, but because it's so damned promethean in its purpose.  It is, very much, an attempt to see the world as God must see it (it is, I think, at least as successful as Terrence Malick's attempts to do so with different means, but sometimes similar subject matters—including budget CGI theropods).  I said it takes a while to get used to, but it took me virtually no time to be thrilled by it; my reaction on seeing its opening epochs-collapsing montage the first and second time is sufficiently embarrassing that I don't think I'll tell you about it.  I was mesmerized each time, the entire time.

But it's not just a technical feat, it's such an ideal join of form and story that it aches: the movie is all about how youth is consumed with imagining all your possible futures, while at the end of your life you discover that all those possibilities were closed off; yet it is a movie that, through its unusual nature, emphasizes that those possibilities were an illusion anyway.  That can be extremely sad.  But, in the end (though nothing ever ends, and can barely be said to have begun) Here gets us to a place where we can say, also, that that's okay.  It is a towering achievement.  There are a lot of movies that are essentially just people talking in rooms, but this might be the greatest ever at figuring out how to make people talking in rooms feel like the most amazing thing you've ever seen.

Score: 10/10

*R. Zemeckis's daughter playing Hanks and Wright's character's daughter; yes, that's cute.

**Possibly better known from its stint as Levittown, 1958-1963.

***Which I believe would place Willingboro underwater.  But I told you, no pedantry.

****Potentially because they have no children.  Of course, it's also only because they get rich and move, so we merely don't see them face death and loss, like everyone else.