Here (2024)

I go again on my own

In the decade following his extended, largely unsuccessful, mo-cap experiment, Robert Zemeckis looked inward. I think there’s a case to read every one of his films since 2010 as a reflection of or reaction to his career journey, though you’d have to strain with his two most recent films, the mercenary streaming turds, The Witches and Pinocchio. The Walk and Welcome to Marwen, both deeply fascinating and compelling films in different ways, offer two sides of a coin: In one, art is noble and dangerous and inherently worthy, even and especially if a creator has to pour all of his life force into it. In the other, the artist is deluded and self-destructive and the summation of his flaws; when he pours those demons outward, it is a bit of misguided coping, the film itself an alienating bit of extended self-mockery. (I really need to rewatch and review of Welcome to Marwen.)

With Here, Zemeckis is once again getting pensive, but this time he revisits and expands the themes of one of his films in particular, Forrest Gump, the work that is Zemeckis’s biggest legacy in enduring popularity and cultural cachet. I’ve seen Gump four times and liked it a little less each time, though I suspect I’ll reverse course a bit whenever I get around to a fifth screening; I’m less sensitive to weird and uneven politics in cinema now than I was four years ago. For Here, Zemeckis got the whole gang back together: stars Robin Wright and Tom Hanks, screenwriter Eric Roth, composer Alan Silvestri, cinematographer Don Burgess, and more. Granted, Silvestri and Burgess are among Zemeckis’s regulars, so their appearance is hardly a special occasion, but the para-text of Forrest Gump is palpable in almost every respect throughout Here.

Here is a bold experiment, an exercise in simultaneously embracing a hyper-focused constriction and a cosmic sprawl, a single-shot Cloud Atlas of sorts. I won’t describe all the specifics of the storytelling and formal exercise here, as there is a lot of pleasure in discovering its mechanics in real time. The film offers an outside-in take on Gump’s wide cultural embrace. The Best Picture winner explored the broad geography of the United States, using the nation’s post-WW2 cultural and historical events the very backbone and content of the story. By contrast, Here shows those crucial American events of the past 70 years (and beyond) in periphery and subtext only. In holding the steadiest of gazes on a single point and small group of people, he revisits the Baby Boomer cultural arc and finds it not an uplifting, bittersweet tale of exceptionalism and sturdy glory, like he did in Forrest Gump, but an echo of eons of mundane suffering. The human cycle will repeat, Here contends, and life itself will remain as it always has been: a noisy cataclysm of interrupted happiness and inevitable decline.

This is an existentially bleak film for much of its duration. In the final scene, a character proclaims “I love it here” — the “here” of the sentence meaning any of a dozen different things depending on your reading — and it is one of the most bitterly ironic closings of any film I can recall, a sentimental aphorism clouded in layers of cruelty. But it is more complicated than that, too; because the “I love it here” line does reflect the happiness of a fleeting instant. Zemeckis is challenging the audience to consider some tough questions he’s working through himself about the meaning and value of human existence: Is it authentic to shape your life story around blips of happiness, or is the truth something more dire and mundane? The happy moments are surrounded by bitter ones: failed dreams and loss and long roads to obsolescence.

The film is brimming with oceans of subtext and heartache, but on the surface Here still has a broadly nostalgic texture. One Letterboxd review cites the film (pejoratively) as a “Boomer diorama.” Amidst his existential contemplation, Zemeckis still devotes significant effort to capturing the evolving American aesthetics and kitsch of the second half of the 20th century, where the way citizens feel is defined by our pastimes: what music we listen to, what fashion is in style, what furniture style is trendy, etc.

And so Here is a film of complicated, contradictory ideas, both shallow and heavy depending on the perspective we take. He really hammers home the different, subjective viewpoints one can tackle the film’s content through with the barrage of frames. Of course, there is the frame of film itself, rock steady throughout the film. Zemeckis cuts between timelines with smaller, inner frames, partial slices of our viewpoint warping the time-space continuum. And the characters use frames, too: Most striking is Richard (Hanks) love of painting; he captures the world the way he sees it in his own rectangular canvas; for him, the world is more heartfelt and personal than the audience’s immobile gaze. The story is saturated with frames-within-frames of screens and cameras and TVs; reality further compressed and refracted in the eyes of the beholder.

I ought to reflect on the presentation of the film before I wrap here. There’s no getting around the fact that this is an ugly film. It is almost harmonically ugly — the slightly-glossy CGI look, cleaned up with AI, pervading the entirety of the runtime. It is a visual mess that synchronizes with the gaudy, provocative jumble of themes. The AI de-aging of actors is very bad; fake-young Tom Hanks is the most successful operation, overall looking like his young self, but a little squashed like somebody sat on the model. Robin Wright gets the worst of it; the woman who William Goldman once said was so beautiful at age 20 that crew members would stop what they were doing to watch her walk by has merely had some of her age-58 wrinkles sanded away. The voice de-aging is even worse; Paul Bettany plays Tom Hanks’ father but never sounds older than him.

And Here is a clunky late-era Zemeckis so it should be little surprise there is some astringent and ineffective stabs of humor. The worst offender is a runner about Benjamin Franklin and his illegitimate son. I genuinely have no idea what Zemeckis and Roth were aiming for, or if the gag is just a poorly conceived transplant from the graphic novel from which this film was loosely adapted.

But as messy and unhinged and strange and occasionally incoherent as Here is, I also think it is great. Full on, capital-G great, one of Zemeckis’s most provocative films (if not quite one of his best overall — I’ve updated my ranking). I have rarely been so engaged and befuddled this year, so deeply curious to tease apart exactly what the story in front of me was and why it was being told this way. Robert Zemeckis remains a technical craftsman first and foremost, always trying out new gizmos like AI algorithms. But I think critics and audiences have not appreciated how he has charged some of the films in his later career with a vulnerable, introspective voice, and it’s rarely been more potent than in Here. The result is flawed but one of my favorite films of the year.

Is It Good?

Very Good (6/8)

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Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.