Nothing forces the folks in “Here” to stay.
Yet stay they do until you’re tired of them whining about the house, the relatives, the economy, the world.
In short, “Here” is neither here nor there.
Perhaps that’s because director Robert Zemeckis is too enamored with the film’s technical aspects. Shooting from a specific location, he shows how different lives pass through the space and, often, obsess over mundane issues.
Tom Hanks and Robin Wright play the two who appear the most, though there are others.
He’s an artist who has to take a job in sales once he discovers his girlfriend (Wright) is pregnant. Because they can’t afford their own home, they live with his parents. And stay until, finally, the folks move out.
At one point, she becomes resentful of the situation – and why not? Even though they toss in a line about money, they could have struck out on their own.
Zemeckis’ conceit – shooting the activity from one vantage point from a largely locked-down camera – becomes tedious and hardly the account you’d want it to be. When the camera finally moves (and shows a huge room attached), you wonder why so much attention was paid to the one with the bay window. (Couldn’t the dining room be a place for activity?)
There, they hold a wedding, a funeral, countless dinners, a birth and a couple of deaths.
Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly turn up as Hanks’s parents, but they’re merely a plot device.
What fascinates (besides the footage of dinosaurs and early Americans) is how Zemeckis isn’t afraid to move phrases (like “thank you for your service”) out of their time period. He shifts other things, too, and often winds up with a soap opera look to his film.
Wright and Hanks, reunited after their turn in “Forrest Gump,” aren’t all that compelling as the couple. Suffering in silence through much of her stay, she’s not really a fan of the house. Because of poor financial planning, he abandons painting, then takes it back up again.
That “de-aging” process is used to make them look believable as teenagers but it wasn’t really necessary. All the action is shot at such a distance it’s like watching a play and buying the idea that Stockard Channing is a teen.
While the furnishings barely switch out (a couple of couches are in too many scenes for anyone’s good), the “bones” of the room remain the same. Only during those prehistoric and early American scenes do you really get to eyeball what the plot of land is like. All sorts of animals romp by, but the focus is on Hanks and Wright.
They’re OK, even though you expect more from both. The story tries too hard to make points about all our lives and winds up capturing none of them.
Like other Zemeckis films, it’s a bold experiment. But, sometimes, effort needs to be put into the script before it’s lavished on the shooting technique. This isn’t another “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” or, sadly, even another “Forrest Gump.”
