Tom Hanks and Robin Wright star in harsh and disappointing film: NPR

Tom Hanks and Robin Wright star Here, a film based on the millennia-spanning graphic novel by Richard McGuire. It's technically and narratively difficult to tell the story on screen, and the result is cluttered and confusing.

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The marketing of the film Here has its status as Forrest Gump Reunion for Tom Hanks, Robin Wright and director Robert Zemeckis. (The script is also by Gump Screenwriters Zemeckis and Eric Roth.) Whether a Forrest Gump Reunification was something people were looking for 30 years later, Here has a lot in common with its predecessor, including the feeling that it's sometimes more tricky than good, both technically and narratively.

Based on a graphic novel by Richard McGuire, Here is filmed from a single angle: the corner of a living room somewhere in the United States. (Probably somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, for reasons having to do with Benjamin Franklin. It's a long story. Literally.) The core of the film is the relationship between Richard (Hanks) and Margaret (Wright), the we meet as teenagers They fall in love and then follow until they are 80 years old.

But in addition to her story, Here also shows vignettes of other lives in the house over time: There are Richard's parents, along with the people who lived there in the early 20th century, a couple in the 1920s, and even a family during COVID-19 after Richard and Margaret have left. Furthermore, we see the view from the same spot before the house was even built, when a couple known only as Indigenous Man and Woman shared warm moments there. (And when there were dinosaurs there, and during the colonial era, and yes, that's where Ben Franklin comes in.)

To fit all this into a film that's just over an hour and a half long, the scenes are very short – however, the scenes I had planned in my head while watching seemed to be mostly in the 30-45 second range Some are longer (especially the ones with monologues) and some are shorter. The result is a very long montage with an admirable thesis: all sorts of extraordinary things happen in an ordinary house. People are born and die, they fall in and out of love, they have ideas and make art, and they experience important moments along with the rest of the world.

The strange thing is that the film is misleading precisely because it suggests that it is a house unusual sooner than usual. It played a role in colonial history, it has an important artifact buried in the back yard, and in a very charmingly played but very kitschy touch, it was the place where an important invention was invented. It didn't actually need these things. Families are enough, and that should have been the point.

Visually, the level of experimentation Zemeckis employs is impressive – one technique uses inserted boxes, almost like windows in an Advent calendar, where one box appears and you can look through that scene at another. For example, you're watching a scene from 1980, but a box opens and shows you the fireplace in 1940. And to even figure out how to film like that, how to deal with depth of field and focus, you have to have already been a gigantic task. (I think I would be more interested in a documentary about how they did it Here when I was inside Here.)

Unfortunately, the underlying story struggles to get going due to the film's overload. Wright manages admirably to give Margaret a real personality in relatively modest screen time, but it's not clear who many of the other characters, including Richard, really are.

While the Indigenous Men and Indigenous Women business is certainly a reasonable attempt to acknowledge that the history of a place does not match the history of a house, it feels superficial and underdeveloped. The Black family we see living in the house in 2020 may have it even worse, limiting themselves to worrying about COVID and giving their son “the talk” about dealing with the police. It's not that they shouldn't have included these things, but it's sad that these are almost the only on-screen moments the family has. In a crowded movie like HereSome things always fell short – almost everything does. But these things have a special sting.

Unfortunately it's not a good film. But as NPR film critic Bob Mondello pointed out, it's interesting to see how longtime directors like Zemeckis try to incorporate their entire filmmaking philosophy into these later projects, ensuring that what they want to say gets said. In fact, this might be more poignant and pointed about mortality and meaning than anything else in the film itself.

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