In Here, the placement of the camera never changes, only the era.
The film endeavors to show us the universality of our individual lives; the message seems to be that you can plunk a camera down in one random place for hundreds of years, and capture common human experiences, over and over.
Most of the film revolves around Al Young (Paul Bettany) and his wife Rose (Kelly Reilly), who purchase a house in 1945, and raise their son Richard (Tom Hanks) there. Eventually Richard marries his girlfriend Margaret (Robin Wright), and a lot of very relatable things keep happening.
There comes a time in everybody’s life when the dreams of youth give way to the realities of adulthood. There comes a time in everybody’s life when a fortune cookie is opened, and someone jokingly says, “Help! I’m trapped in a fortune cookie factory.”
Here invites us to smile, or laugh, or cry in recognition.
Yet the human experience is also characterized by surprises and secrets, and Here contains precious few. It feels like a greatest hits compilation from a series of home movies. The Youngs have been manufactured to be recognizable, and nothing else; at no point do we get to know them as individuals.
Even worse, Here does not confine itself to the story of the Youngs. The film jumps back and forth through time, in frustratingly brief glimpses. We are introduced to a Native American, courting the woman he loves in the middle of a forest. Benjamin Franklin shows up, as does the inventor of the La-Z-Boy chair. We meet an aviator and his disapproving wife; we see an African American family during COVID.
There are way too many of these threads, and the film cuts back and forth between them too quickly. They are also very perfunctory; some are limited to three or four short moments. Then, halfway through the run time, they mostly go away, so that the movie can focus on the characters played by Hanks and Wright. The makers of Here needed to commit to all of the storylines or sacrifice some of them.
Would Here have worked without the unmoving camera? Not even remotely. The various characters and plot lines are so generic and ephemeral that the gimmick is what lends the movie all its interest.
Unfortunately, even with the gimmick, Here does not really work. Watching multiple stories, in brief glimpses, like a fly on a wall, makes one feel distant, and trapped.
AI technology, used to age and de-age Hanks and Wright in real time during shooting, was heavily touted when Here was being promoted. Yet I think most people would agree that de-aging technology has not been mastered even when applied the normal way, in post-production. A lot of Here looks a little too dark, and maybe the filmmakers were trying to hide the limitations of their shiny new tools.
It is not the biggest problem on display.
Here is daring and heartfelt, and I give it points for that. I really wanted to love it. I remember looking forward to Robert Zemeckis’s movies when I was younger; his stories were indivisible from the special effects used to tell them. Who Framed Roger Rabbit is the only movie I have ever seen where every special effect is perfect, with no false illusions to take the viewer out of the film.
Death Becomes Her, Forrest Gump, The Polar Express...these films could not have been made without sophisticated technology that ended up advancing the art of film. It’s sad that Here doesn’t really work on a storytelling or a technological level. I’m not sorry I saw it, but I don’t think I’ll ever revisit it.