Review: ‘Here’ is both the most personal and most universal film of the year, and momentous as a piece of art

Of all the cinematic possibilities to have manifested in the last few years, none tickle the ears quite as curiously as the Forrest Gump brain trust — complete with Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Eric Roth, and Robert Zemeckis — reuniting to make a comic book movie.

That’s tongue-in-cheek phrasing, of course. Here, the film in question, isn’t what most think of when they hear the words “comic book movie”; what tends to come to mind is a flashy, somewhat cheesy, somewhat hopeful, and increasingly contrived blockbuster battle between good and evil. This is far from the heights that comic book movies are capable of reaching, but they’re what Hollywood tends to confine them to.

And curiously, Here, for its part, is both a cosmically unconfined film, and among cinema’s most confined pieces in history this side of 12 Angry Men. But most importantly, Here is not far from the heights that comic book movies are capable of reaching. By using its high-concept premise to ensure that Hanks, Wright, and the rest of the cast play in service to the camera rather than the other way around, Here‘s achievement is as remarkable as it is unconventional.

Based on Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic novel of the same name, Here examines the events, occurrences, revelations, and other such developments that occur on a single spot on Earth over millions of years, from Chicxulub’s fateful impact that marked the end of the Cretaceous period, all the way up to modern residents of a sweet little home somewhere in the United States.

The film primarily focuses on couple Richard (Hanks) and Margaret (Wright) Young, as we follow their relationship from high school sweethearts to their golden years. Along the way, we’re shown glimpses of what occurred in this space in and around the Civil War, the pre-Columbian era, and when other couples occupied the house.

As if the choice to present the most extreme version of a single-location story doesn’t tip you off, Here is not a film that can or should be defined by its adherence to traditional storytelling or dramatic standards. If one were to do that, they’d conclude that Zemeckis’ latest is a jumble of dry performances, undercooked drama, and an overreliance on a visual gimmick.

None of these criticisms are necessarily incorrect, but they don’t hold much weight. Dry performances are no great flaw when capturing the beautifully mundane ups, downs, and lovingly cringey banter of everyday life (regardless of the time that such everyday life took place in). Undercooked drama is no great flaw in the context of a film where the point isn’t what happens, but the simple fact that it is happening. And an overreliance on a visual gimmick makes perfect sense if that gimmick single-handedly represents the thematic thrust of your film, and is therefore the focal point of the story you’re trying to tell here; to say Here relies too much on its visual/presentational gimmick is like saying Blue Jasmine relies too much on Cate Blanchett.

To that point, Here doesn’t tell a specific story so much as suggest the story inherent to wherever you happen to be sitting or standing at any given time. With the Young house as its muse, Here is interested in exploring the idea of how much history, proof of existence, and emotional fluctuation is capable of being packed into a single point in space, which plays upon how we viewers regard perspective from both an emotional and existential standpoint.

For instance, a memorable scene sees Richard openly contemplate how much time he spent worrying about the future; a future that ultimately didn’t resemble anything that Richard worried about, just as the early days of Richard and Margaret’s marriage was never connected to the fact that it was on their plot of land that the end of the Civil War was announced, and just as that announcement was never beholden to the dinosaurs that were stomping around there millennia earlier. Here is a codex of that plot of land, and the film primarily asks us to regard the near-inconceivable depth of that codex as it relates to our experience on our own geographical codices.

The final scene drives this home even further. Without giving too much away, we realize just how many more emotions and histories were exchanged in other rooms in this house, in the spaces between the spaces, and how the nuances of memory — in all its fallibility — play into this high-concept equation.

The film then quickly dials up this revelation to a thousand by visually announcing just how much more history this world holds outside of our most familiar spaces. It’s easy to think about how big the world is, but Here wants us to feel the emotional equivalent of that fact, and subsequently move beyond the limits that we individually tend to define our lives and actions by.

And Zemeckis never stops dotting the proceedings with such nudges. The end of the Civil War is bookended by the question “What now,” Richard shows his daughter the moon centuries after an Indigenous man shows his newborn child the moon. A pair of 1700s-era gents mock Benjamin Franklin, saying that no one will ever remember his name, and then Richard does an impression of the storied inventor in the same space one Halloween night. A radio television program from years and years ago provides a fitting soundtrack for whatever antics occur years and years later.

It’s a daring, hypnotic-yet-tranquil, and sentimental meditation wherein the time periods all playfully mix and match themselves to paint many a picture that’s not beholden to time. Instead, time is used as a toolbox to capture definitive proof that so, so many living things are, were, and will continue to be alive, and that each and every one of them matters.

Here may not revolutionize the long-treaded family drama, nor will it be a testament to anyone’s ability as an actor. But as a cinematic exercise that seeks to highlight the profundity in the most unfiltered essence of our existence, resident game-changer Zemeckis has triumphantly added to such a reputation.