Mucking With Movies: ‘Here’

In “Here,” the “Forrest Gump” team is reunited, with Robert Zemeckis in the director’s chair, Eric Roth behind the script, and Tom Hanks and Robin Wright acting out the terrible disease of falling in and out of love. They also make all the same mistakes that plague “Forrest Gump,” which, for the full sake of disclosure, I absolutely detest. Watching that movie is like sitting in a history class with the teacher who tells the worst jokes but thinks he’s hilarious and sucks at his job. Both provide you with a surface-level look at everything Zemeckis wants to address, from his thematic themes to the historical happenings he shoehorns in. 

I’m not here to review “Forrest Gump,” but it is relevant enough, as the films are essentially doing the same things. Whereas Gump wanders the wasteland in search of the American Dream, now Hanks plays Richard from the time he is 18 and falls for Wright’s Margaret. This love leads to a teen pregnancy, and now, instead, the feather in the wind of “Forrest Gump” is locked inside his parent’s home. We see how the wide, wide world can make an individual so incredibly small when it crushes you under its weight. Hanks is not the only family depicted living in this house, but he is the only one there from his beginning to his end. He is “Here.” 

Forced to give up on the idealistic dreams that he forged from teenage weightlessness, we watch Richard shuffle through life doing his best to provide for his family while his family also struggles to leave home to make their mark on the world. It is his father, his mother, his siblings, his wife, and now, his own child all shoved in there together. It’s a multitude of people being put through the circle of life. I know this because, at one point, a character shouts it into my face just as that flower is about to blossom. It is my biggest issue with Zemeckis’ directing: No subtly is allowed into worlds. Anything implicit is made to become explicit, which eventually just leaves me exhausted. 

You may have noticed that I mentioned Hanks plays a teenager and considered how odd that must be to look at. The feeling never goes away as you watch. Utilizing de-aging CGI still does not sit right with me. My two biggest issues with it stand out strongly in “Here.”

One: There is no getting around the fact that the actors are still going to move like their own age rather than their character’s age. At one point, a young Richard tries to stand from the floor in a one-legged lunge, and you can see the 68-year-old Hanks strain to make the motion fluid. You can’t de-age somebody’s muscles and the stiffness that takes over as the years tick by. At least, not yet. 

My second issue is one that technology will never be able to catch up to, as it lies with the audience’s perception. We have been watching Hanks for decades now. His success has been so persistent and his appearances so frequent that we have watched him age throughout his adulthood. His appearance in the movie, as fresh-faced as he was when he made “Big,” is so jarring, it rips you away from any suspension of disbelief an audience member could possibly muster. I kept waiting for him to start dancing on a giant toy piano with Robert Loggia. The audience knows Hanks; I end up pondering more on the technology that has him looking so youthful than the scene he is in.  

Zemeckis took on an extremely challenging project here. With one location, one camera frame, and a multitude of emotions to deliver, he took a story that yearns to be an off-Broadway play and delivered a film that is engaging visually and paced rapidly but never becomes overwhelming. It put a lump in my throat for 104 minutes of its runtime and had me calling my mom afterward to apologize for missing so many holidays and family gatherings.

But it makes you cry in the way that the television show “This Is Us” made us sob. It knows the most tender parts of your soul and presses on them with all of its might. It sacrifices everything in its pursuit, including its authenticity. Nothing about “Here” feels real, even as it deals with grounded issues. The emotions it conjures up are superfluous at best and manipulative at worst.

“Here” is a genuinely great flick for a certain crowd, and with what I promise is zero facetiousness, I’m just not that crowd. 

Critic Score: 6.9 out of 10

Jack Simon is a mogul coach and writer/director who enjoys eating food he can’t afford, traveling to places out of his budget, and creating art about skiing, eating, and traveling while broke. Check out his website jacksimonmakes.com to see his Jack’s Jitney travelogue series. You can email him at jackdocsimon@gmail.com for inquiries of any type.