Here opens in theaters November 1. With its camera plunked down in the corner of a living room for 104 minutes, Robert Zemeckis' Here takes us through the life of one American family, the Youngs, through much of the 20th century. Using frames-within-frames to transition between decades (and provide glimpses of the people who occupied this space before and after the Youngs), life in all its hues is captured at a fixed, observational distance.
It’s an intriguing concept, but Zemeckis may be too much of a sentimentalist to make it work. The technological tinkering that once elevated his filmmaking but has entirely consumed it for the past 20 years (seen here in the dire de-aging of stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright) certainly doesn't help, but the problems plaguing Here are rooted in its conception. The film is based on Richard McGuire's 2014 graphic novel of the same name (and its six-page predecessor from 1989) – an experimental comic that has now spawned a disappointingly straightforward dramatic adaptation.
The cast and crew are, in theory, just as much of a selling point as the one-angle gimmick. It reunites the director with his Forrest Gump cast and crew: actors Hanks and Wright, screenwriter Eric Roth, composer Alan Silvestri, and cinematographer Don Burgess. You can also hear the echoes of Forrest Gump in the way that Zemeckis and Roth use the roadmap of McGuire’s comic – a more contemplative work about the spaces we occupy – to chart the Young family's traject.