‘Here’: An Experimental Film Saddled With The Corniest Script Imaginable

Robert Zemeckis, once one of the most celebrated filmmakers in America, currently enjoys nearly the exact same “late style” cult as another auteur with a film in theaters, Clint Eastwood; that is to say, an audience charmed ironically by stodginess and sincerely by classicalism. The picture of their late career arc is similar enough for the comparison; neither is quite an “old master,” but each hold legacy pop cultural clout enough to generate so many November greenlights that structural and formal experimentation just falls out of each of them, in spades and in stealthy Oscar-bait guise. The 15:17 to Paris and The Mule found Eastwood fully divorced from orthodox dramaturgy, and Zemeckis’ formal play didn’t end with his mocap animation trilogy of the late 2000s (The Polar Express, Beowulf, A Christmas Carol).

Zemeckis’s docudrama forays prompted auteurist treatises on his stature as a sentimental American mythologian. Of those, 2018’s Welcome to Marwen was a notably weird swathing of sentimentality in practical fx and bald auteur Easter egg sandboxing, but his latest, HERE, is perhaps the culmination of this trend: a dyed-in-the-wool experimental film overlayed with the corniest script you’ve ever seen. 

You can’t surpass the great critic Nick Pinkerton’s assessment of HERE as a “Boomercore Wavelength (1967) remake”. The premise is simple: the camera never moves (it does in Wavelength actually, though, famously, barely) but once; it’s all just a tableau, differentiated in scene purely by time, and by picture-in-picture style frames to contrive serendipity. Dinosaurs, Native Americans, and four generations of families experience loss, elation, quarrels and leisure within the confines of a frame that for most of the film pictures a living room. If the word “melodrama” comes originally from “melody,” this is like an attempt to fashion melody out of a drone music toolkit, with exotic harmonies at that (with respect to its temporal jumps). On paper it’s daring, in practice its most important part requires anodyne safety to contrast. 

One can’t also help recall the Peggy Hill penned script in the late period King of the Hill episode “Six Characters in Search of a House,” in which she puts on a play in an effort to cheese an open house audience into purchasing a house that will bear witness so many special life moments. There, the idea is an eyeroller, and Zemeckis doesn’t come close to rescuing it. Luckily it’s really just half the idea the house only matters to the people who inhabit it; the space is the broader idea.

To that end, there’s not much point in attempting to describe the primary narrative itself beyond the fact that Tom Hanks lives out an idealized-as-imperfect baby boomer life, defined notably by his desire to paint being squeezed out by his duty to win bread. Its standardness is an afterthought for the platitudinous nature of its didactic formal rhymes, Gumpian pop culture history referencemongering, weepy score swelling and gobsmackingly ancient cliche (Hanks’ daughter can’t stop listening to her walkman long enough to take a dang family picture!). Robyn Wright’s understated performance is a real highlight in a film of such winking gesticulation. 

You need to expect winking gesticulation is to be expected in a late-period Zemeckis. His defenders have long excused the tics of his narrative presentation as a quaint relic of his mainstream origins, choosing to highlight the experimentation that indeed defines Here moreso than any other recent work. Considering how transparently self referential the old man has become (Here recasting Hanks and Wright in another tour through history, inverting the massive scope of Gump), one could say he’s one of the most “auteurist’s auteur” we’ve got right now. Anyone else looking to see this thing better either know who Michael Snow is or have the aged sensibility that keeps “food movies” arthouse hits.