This article appeared in the November 15, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Here (Robert Zemeckis, 2024)

When the cast of Robert Zemeckis’s Here was announced two years ago, Gump-heads rejoiced. Three decades after Forrest Gump (1994), Tom Hanks and Robin Wright were reuniting with Zemeckis (along with screenwriter Eric Roth, cinematographer Don Burgess, and composer Alan Silvestri) for what looked like an alternate-universe version of Forrest and Jenny’s love affair. Now, or more appropriately here, they would be Richard and Margaret Young, whose lives would unfold in the space of a single living room in less than two hours. Through a series of non-diegetic white frames that open in the room like portals, they would be joined by other inhabitants of the home, past and future: Richard’s World War II–scarred parents, Rose and Al; a prim suffragette; the zany, fictitious inventor of the La-Z-Boy recliner (the film’s most Zemeckisian flourish); a family living through the COVID-19 pandemic; and—I’m not sure which is sillier—a nest of dinosaur eggs and Benjamin Franklin visiting his relations, who once lived across the street. Here’s temporal span is as vast as its sense of space is limited: with rare exceptions, the camera remains locked in the same fixed perspective. Forrest can once again find his love, only this time, he has far less room to run.

Here’s most prominent feature, and a genuinely compelling one, is this unique formal gambit. There are hardly any conventional edits in the entire film; instead, new scenes literally emerge from within previous ones, like a palimpsest or the overlapping browser windows of a computer screen. For instance, a white-rimmed rectangle appears in the corner of a shot of the home’s austere, early-20th-century mahogany interiors. The image within the box fades in, along with sound: a woman vacuuming around cluttered furniture in the 1940s. The frame then enlarges until it has fully replaced the earlier shot. Later, this new shot gives way to another moment in time, and so on, so that the film has the feeling of disparate memories floating into view—though to whom these recollections belong is an open question. One candidate is a seemingly immortal hummingbird who flits in at auspicious moments, similar to the white feather that visits Forrest at the bus stop. The human characters, meanwhile, remain oblivious to the other beings that occupy the screen alongside them, in space if not time—no one feels so much as a ghostly shiver when they walk into the spot where we recently witnessed an open-casket funeral, or registers the fact that New Year’s Eve fireworks play simultaneously on one era’s television and outside another’s window. Each scene might move forward or backward in time from the one preceding it, featuring either the same or a completely different set of people. Moments cohabitate, but they do not coincide. The effect is like sorting through a box of photographs after they have all been dumped onto the floor.

Despite this dazzling technical conceit, the story of Here is conspicuously thin. Richard grows up in a fraught but supportive home, and falls in love with and marries Margaret; once together, the two raise a daughter and struggle with marital problems. Their troubles are typical of their boomer generation: Margaret wants their family to find a new home of their own, while Richard waits for a raise that never arrives. Hanks and Wright are soulful and adept, even if Hanks’s older Richard slides into folksy Garrison Keillor territory. Critics will inevitably lay into Zemeckis’s use of A.I. to de-age his actors digitally, but, strangely, this didn’t bother me much, even when the movie flaunted its technological prowess by, say, morphing Wright’s face into an older version of itself. The film’s basic problem involves a different kind of surface: no amount of CG or wistful smiles from beloved actors can substitute for a script that amounts to an inspirational-quote-of-the-day calendar. “Time sure flies, doesn’t it?” Richard murmurs. Not fast enough, as it turns out.

Zemeckis fans will find much that’s familiar. Richard is fundamentally decent, if slightly bumbling, like Forrest Gump, Marty McFly in Back to the Future (1985), Chuck Noland in Cast Away (2000), and Mark Hogancamp in Welcome to Marwen (2018) before him. His predecessors stumble into history in accidental and mostly amusing ways, like Forrest unintentionally tipping off hotel security about the Watergate break-in or Marty’s guitar-playing inspiring Chuck Berry over a telephone line. (Let’s bracket for a moment the blatantly counterfactual fantasy that the history of rock and roll began with a Black musician stealing riffs from a white teenager.) Here represents the logical end point of Zemeckis’s ultimately frivolous interest in history. Richard, his most determinedly ordinary hero, has no coincidental encounters with greatness; instead, history is relegated to set dressing, visible only through the window or on the television set that the characters, inexplicably, never seem to watch.

Regrettably, the non-white characters in Here aren’t given much to do. A presumably Lenni-Lenape couple whose necklace is discovered in the backyard by ethnographers are never identified by their tribal affiliation—not even by the researchers!—and in the credits they are listed simply as “Indigenous Man” (Joel Oulette) and “Indigenous Woman” (Dannie McCallum). Meanwhile, a Black family is used primarily to sketch out the present, as when they sit their teenage son down to talk to him about police brutality or weep over the COVID-19 death of their Latina housekeeper, who, moments earlier, is seen trying unsuccessfully to smell a bouquet of flowers. The film’s attitude toward them can be summed up in their aggressively bland interior décor, which looks as soulful as an Airbnb.

These non-white characters function like the musket shots of the Revolutionary War that we hear fired across the street at one point in the film, or the announcement of the attack on Pearl Harbor on the radio—they happen “out there,” at a remove, and leave the Young family untouched. Richard and Margaret live mostly happily in the living room, where they kiss, paint, fight, dance, and gaze at the moon. History, the message seems to be, is chaotic, violent, and beyond our control. Best to stay indoors. This attitude was apparent at least as far back as Forrest Gump, when Jenny was punished with AIDS (!) for her idealism and attraction to activist causes like the anti-war movement and the Black Panther Party. Only when she came back to Forrest and his childhood home could she find the peace she had spent her life seeking. True happiness, for Zemeckis, is always a matter of retreat.

It’s never clear why Richard, who has never lived anywhere outside of this house, insists on staying, even when his marriage threatens to crumble over the issue. I can’t help but think that Zemeckis needed him there to justify the set he so meticulously constructed. The living room in Here is a lot like Marwen, the miniature WWII-era Belgian town of Welcome to Marwen, where Steve Carrell’s Mark Hogancamp stages dolls in elaborate poses and photographs them, creating a fantasy world with which to work through his trauma. I can’t say if Zemeckis has the same narrative motivation in his new film, but the structural similarity is undeniable. Time and again, he myopically focuses on his (not so) everyman hero, who exists apart from history, whether on a desert island in Cast Away, within a childlike mind in Gump, or in a living room in Here. In these films, the value of the past is entirely personal, like Marty McFly continually returning to and tweaking the timeline to improve his family’s middle-class fortunes. This is the opposite of historical allegory, where the plight of an individual expresses that of a people or a nation—instead, for this director, the world bends around a single person.

We’re so often captivated by Zemeckis’s technical wizardry, embodied by his wild-eyed inventor characters, that we fail to notice how solipsistic and small his imagination actually is. The unexpected irony of Here is that its focus on a single room is so rigid, so airless, that the viewer’s attention naturally drifts to the window, inviting them to wonder what else is out there. It’s too bad that Richard, like Forrest before him, and Zemeckis all along, isn’t curious enough to find out.

Genevieve Yue is an associate professor of culture and media at The New School, and the author of Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality (Fordham University Press, 2020).