Some vindication felt after I previously compared Zemeckis’ bizarro Pinocchio redo to Manoel de Oliveira and now he’s gone and riffed on Rohmer’s Lady and the Duke. With a soupçon, come computer-generated finale, of digi-Sirk. (Let the blown mind emojis flow!)
Here is the natural result of Bob Z’s new-flesh mo-capping, though if we’re to position this strange and stimulating object within the output of his generation of boomer auteurs (all of whom earthshakingly changed the American cinematic landscape for mostly big-picture worse and are now at the twin stages of grapple and regret), it’s really his Irishman. The face-replacement program(s) that deepfake Tom Hanks and Robin Wright into their younger selves don’t convince in any traditional sense. I’m personally primed to look for the seams, and it also appears that, unlike Scorsese, Zemeckis doesn’t allow his two lead performers their actual eyeballs so that some window-to-the-soul reality remains.
But I think that’s all to the point: The computerized fakery of youth collides with the tangibility, on multiple other scene partners, of either aged-up makeup F/X or little A.I.-and-otherwise tarting at all. What’s corpse and what’s corporeal is constantly in dialogue, to the point that when smooth-skinned 1s-and-0s Robin Wright stepped into extreme closeup and morphed into her present-day crow’s footed self I gasped in astonishment. Coup de fuggin’ cinema! (And a riposte, in all its resonances, to Alien: Romulus’ ghoulish grave-robbing of Ian Holm.)
That the majority of Here is also shot from a single fixed perspective puts this newfangled whatsit in the ideological and aesthetic vicinity of the Lumières. Though movement does occur via the constant rectangular paneling of imagery (a mo-pic rethinking of source material by comics artist Richard McGuire), which overlays vignettes that occur from the Cretaceous to Covid. A stretch, perhaps, to say that your house was the site where the La-Z-Boy was invented and that your across-the-street neighbor was once Benjamin Franklin? Maybe no more so than that your middle-class suburban hearth also sits atop an Indigenous Peoples’ burial ground and will eventually play host to an African American family discussing the finer points of racist policing with their just-turned-driver’s-age son. (A personal favorite juxtaposition: A politically charged discussion involving a Revolutionary War redcoat that collides with the many-years-later arrival of a “Mayflower” moving truck.)
The Screenplay-by-Eric-Roth-ian Force is strong with this one, though I’m much more willing to go along with Zemeckis-head Dave Kehr’s belief in a Voltaire-and-ilk edge than I am with the fêted (and, barring a revelatory revisit, fetid) Forrest Gump. For whatever sentimental tinkle Alan Silvestri may lend via his musical score, this is a bleak movie at heart, one that details the slow spiraling of its central couple, Hanks and Wright’s Richard and Margaret, into a collective marital and spiritual malaise that is only relieved once minds are literally lost and the stage set of their lives is stripped bare — Norman Rockwell ultimately begetting Samuel Beckett.
The house the film entombs us in is more burden than sanctuary, an albatross around the neck that puts the paltriness of all that happens in and around it in harsh relief. Zemeckis may be wrestling with some of the tunnel-vision thoughtlessness in which his filmmaking has heretofore indulged (think Back to the Future’s “jihad jihad!” Libyans, or the many ways in which his tech-obsessive cinema has been co-opted by those with much less talent, ability, and artistic ethos). But the big takeaway from Here seems to be how humanity’s myriad attributes — the sins, the selflessness, and everything in between — will be swept away.
All things pass. The moments of a life do not accumulate. Except, perhaps, under a watchful camera-eye that is also always-and-ever assured obsolescence and obliteration.