Here: Forrest Gump Reteam Suggests Time Flies Like an Arrow, Fruit Flies Like a Banana

By Liz Braun

Rating: C

Watching the movie Here is a bit like eating a Big Mac — it’s all fine and inoffensive in the moment, but you don’t want to look too closely or think about it too much afterward.

The ambitious Robert Zemeckis-directed drama concerns all the people over time who call a small patch of land in America, home. The film, based on the graphic novel by Richard McGuire, focuses on the same vista as time marches on. Here are dinosaurs on the land, and now there's an Ice Age happening, then greenery slowly creeps back, foliage returns, birds turn up, Indigenous people appear and eventually, we see men building a house.

Didn’t Tree of Life do this better? Never mind.

The residents of that house being built are encountered over the course of the movie, with the action moving back and forth among generations thanks to smaller frames that appear in the big picture and magically lead from one era to another.

You’ll meet a turn-of-the-last-century couple — the man is obsessed with airplanes — with one child; a romantic couple apparently living in the house in the 1930s and ‘40s where, weirdly, the husband invents the La-Z-Boy chair; a couple who move in not long after WWII has ended, and a present-day African American family.

(There are also snippets of other stuff from the past — like Benjamin Franklin visiting the house across the street, but that’s just attractive filler.)

That post-war couple, Al and Rose Young (Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly) and their family seem to get the most on-screen attention. They have three kids, one of whom is Richard — he grows up to be Tom Hanks.

Thanks to the magic of computer de-aging, about which the less said the better, Hanks is a youth here. So is Robin Wright, who plays Margaret, his high school sweetheart and then wife.

Richard and Margaret marry young, and when their baby girl is born, they live with his parents, Al and Rose.

It’s all accompanied by a lot of Baby Boomer nostalgia, with 1960s and ’70s musical choices, era-appropriate furnishings and holiday artifacts, references to Vietnam, The Beatles, Ed Sullivan, etc. People age, babies get born, tragedies and triumphs occur.

Both the 1919 and the 2019 pandemics are touched upon in Here, but there’s a lot of history left out entirely, as is most of the human race except the part that’s straight and white.

Eventually, Al and Rose get old. So do Richard and Margaret.

Like other women of her generation, Margaret doesn’t get to go to college or fulfill her ambition of becoming a lawyer. And she never gets a house of her own, something she keenly wants throughout the narrative. We see her weep with frustration and disappointment on her 50th birthday — so many things she wanted to do and achieve, but she got stuck at home, raising a child, and keeping house. And time flies.

What does it all mean? Don’t look at me.

All that moving around through time (and some intrusive musical choices) are a bit irritating, but Here is essentially a bland entertainment with a few touching bits and a heavy layer of schmaltz.

But there’s a subversive twist.

The movie ends with an elderly Margaret — in the throes of age-related memory loss — happily saying, “I love it here,” in reference to the very place and time that robbed her of any opportunity or independence.

As that makes absolutely no sense, the only possible conclusion is that Zemeckis is secretly reminding women an election is looming, and if they’re willing to allow America to turn the clock back 50 years they must be losing their minds.

Gee, thanks, Robert Zemeckis! And just when you thought Here was just another bit of fantasy nostalgia for a better time that never existed.

Meanwhile, much is being made of the fact that Here reunites the director, actors Hanks and Wright, and writers Eric Roth, DP Don Burgess and even music person Alan Silvestri from the 1994 film, Forrest Gump; an unfortunate coincidence, surely, or perhaps a guide to who might enjoy Here.

Here. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, written by Eric Roth, Zemeckis and Richard McGuire. Starring Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, and Paul Bethany. In theatres November 1.