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One camera angle, zero reasons to see it

Posted on by Kennedy
One camera angle, zero reasons to see it

Here hits theaters November 1st.

While the camera stands in the corner of a living room for 104 minutes, Robert Zemeckis' Here takes us through the life of an American family, the Youngs, through much of the 20th century. Using still images to transition between decades (and to provide insight into the people who inhabited the space before and after the Youngs), life in all its hues is captured from a fixed viewing distance. It's an intriguing concept, but Zemeckis may be too sentimental for it to work. The technical tinkering that once made his filmmaking special but has completely consumed it in the last 20 years (seen here in the terrible aging of stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright) certainly doesn't help, but the problems that Here are the problems that lie in the conception. The film is based on Richard McGuire's 2014 graphic novel of the same name (and its six-page 1989 predecessor) – an experimental comic that has now spawned a disappointingly straightforward dramatic adaptation.

The cast and crew are, in theory, as much of a selling point as the one-angle gimmick. It reunites the director with his Forrest Gump cast and crew: actors Hanks and Wright, screenwriter Eric Roth, composer Alan Silvestri and cinematographer Don Burgess. You can also hear echoes of Forrest Gump in the way Zemeckis and Roth use the roadmap of McGuire's comic – a more contemplative work about the spaces we occupy – to chart the Young family's journey through important events in the US -Drawing history. And it's not just boomers glorifying Gump territory like the Vietnam War – here the Young house is absurdly associated with major American achievements like Benjamin Franklin's harnessing of electricity and the invention of the La-Z-Boy recliner.

A handful of other characters inhabit the suburban Pennsylvania duplex in the '20s and '40s, but the film's core plot begins after World War II, when returning soldier Al Young (Paul Bettany, using an uncertain American accent that barely disguises his own). ). Englishness) buys the property with his pregnant wife Rose (Kelly Reilly). Soon the couple has three children, one of whom grows up to be aspiring teenage artist Richard (Hanks, with a digital facelift that never makes him appear younger than 40), who brings his high school girlfriend Margaret (Wright, not) along through the visuals Effects treated even more friendly) stopped by to meet the parents.

Hanks, who plays a sort of replacement for McGuire who isn't seen in the comic, is a graphic designer who only seems to draw his own living room – the room in the comic was based on McGuire's own home, but surely he had other interests? Wright, on the other hand, is primarily tasked with awkwardly stepping into close-ups to create (and then explain) a thematic dialogue about the fleeting nature of time. This feeling is often mentioned verbally but rarely felt, thanks to the seamless and mechanical editing that never slows down to focus on emotions like joy or fear, but simply pushes them through a temporal revolving door.

Hanks and Wright, in their state of rewinding time, have a deadpan look, as if we were watching Action figures of the two stars stage domestic scenarios. This attempts to be a cinematic translation of McGuire's work, but given the decidedly theatrical quality of his presentation, it would have been more believable to dress Hanks and Wright in wigs and makeup to make them appear younger. Between his unique point of view, Bettany's melodramatic delivery and strained accent, the occasional use of the moon as a spotlight for soliloquies, and even wings through which characters can enter and exit scenes – a door on the left and another room “backstage.” ” right off camera – the film often feels like a pre-recorded stage production, albeit with the glossy sheen of modern VFX.

Unfortunately, not all actors agree on this tonal approach. Hanks is as wildly animated as Woody from “Toy Story,” as if he knew the effects might limit his expression, while Wright delivers understated work alongside him, a separation that follows them through the years. Michelle Dockery is committed to the somber pauses and dry irony typical of live drama as she plays Mrs. Harter, who lives in the house in the 1910s while her daredevil pilot husband John (Gwilym Lee) goes with her The rather broad Chaplin is played -like wink for the camera. Perhaps the only actors who seem to agree are Ophelia Lovibond and David Fynn as a horny couple in the 1940s, filling the screen with life and energy – the only actors who really do.

But as “Here” jumps back and forth between eras (even showing what happened on the surrounding land before the house was built), it takes on a rote, inhuman quality. The time jumps become more obligatory than thought-provoking, creating an awkward middle ground between compressed montages and full dramatic scenes, leading to the emotional impact of both scenes. With only this one camera angle in play, the editing and performances are responsible for the overall dramatic effect – but they seem to work against each other. Once Hanks or Wright begin to deal with the ongoing disagreements between their characters, we are transported to another part of their lives or to a completely different family.

On the surface, this is not dissimilar to McGuire's nonlinear approach. However, both versions of his Here comic are about the sum of recognizable human experiences rather than the stories of individual characters, and his overlapping panels serve to represent the past and present simultaneously, not just to move the story from one time period to another move the next one. The comics reach much further in both directions, pondering the origins of life on Earth and finding exciting and sobering ways to move forward into the distant future. For the most part, Zemeckis' film condenses the breadth of the comics into a saga about the modern United States that ends in the present—as if repeating Forrest Gump's close-up overview of the so-called “American Century.”

An experimental comic has spawned a disappointingly straightforward dramatic adaptation.

Pre-colonial Native American characters appear briefly (as they do in the comic), but in an attempt to create a maudlin retrospective of the United States, Here merely glosses over the darker implications of the country's history and the fact that the Youngs' house is built on one Native American burial site. While McGuire could afford to use implications given the fleeting nature of each page, Zemeckis has no such luxury, working in a more traditional dramatic form. Although no family or character is the focus of the comic, this is a far more drawn-out affair given the narrow focus on Richard and Margaret's troubled romance. McGuire's pages jump quickly between eras, but the film teases out its central drama before hastily fracturing it, leaving gaps that it can only fill with clumsy gestures toward unsavory realities like racism, past and present.

Most unfortunate are the fleeting moments when it seems as if “Here” might come to life cinematically, both as an adaptation and on its own terms. In Forrest Gump style (à la the famous floating feather), a hovering hummingbird seems to connect the different decades and centuries. However, this is one of several poorly rendered digital artifacts that might have been more acceptable to the eye if there had been a few more layers of artificial art separating us from the images on screen – if they had been filmed in 3D, for example. In addition to the elements that threaten to expand and deepen the space in the Youngs' living room (without actually doing so), the filmmakers rarely actually use all three dimensions at their disposal, between a single camera movement during a key moment , as well as the brief introduction of a mirror so we can see characters and scenes outside of the camera's field of view. This lasts barely a minute and all but destroys Here's identity as a specifically cinematic adaptation of McGuire's work.

What we have here is little more than a stylistic imitation of the comics that take their form to play with the boundaries of the page and panel in the first place. There is no formal experimentation or forward momentum in Zemeckis' Here. If anything, it's a regression between the removal of camera movement and variety of shots, which requires a reliance on pre-cinema stagecraft, and the stubborn fidelity to McGuire's two-dimensional compositions. Unfortunately, the characters are equally flat, leading the film to be more interested in physical interiors than emotional ones.

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