Lately, filmmaker Robert Zemeckis has been a somewhat confounding figure. The director of such beloved movies as the “Back to the Future” series, “Forrest Gump,” “Cast Away,” “Death Becomes Her” and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” has delivered almost as many duds as hits, if you also take in “The Polar Express,” “Beowulf,” “Welcome to Marwen” and “Pinocchio.” An experimenter obsessed with special effects and the dramatic power they can exert in cinema, Zemeckis is always trying something new, especially with motion-capture technology.
It doesn’t always work: Many of these projects drift into an unappealing uncanny valley. Despite his several attempts, he hasn’t quite nailed it yet. In his new intergenerational family drama “Here,” based on a 2014 graphic novel by Richard McGuire (expanded from a six-page comic strip published in the comics anthology “Raw” in 1989), the experiment is the narrative itself, a family history spanning generations — and centuries — all told from one fixed point of view.
In his formally inventive graphic novel, McGuire used frames within frames to visually represent different time periods within one panel. Zemeckis maintains the frames-within-frames conceit as a transitional flourish in the film version of “Here,” but the plot itself is more about jumping around in time while maintaining the stationary camera. There are many inhabitants of this space, from a Native American couple (Joel Oulette and .