Robert Zemeckis’ latest movie is insanely ambitious, starting with the dinosaurs and ending in present day with the Roomba. But it’s fixed on just one spot. “Here” reunites Zemeckis, screenwriter Eric Roth and actors Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, who collaborated on “Forrest Gump.
” This time, they’re not telling the larger-than-life story of a man moving through time – they’re telling the centuries-old story of a living room and all the different people who lived there. In this living room, we see a wedding, a death, a birth, a marriage tested, a funeral, lots of vacuuming, many birthdays, Christmases and Thanksgivings, some sex, adults getting drunk and Jazzercise. Zemeckis puts the camera at a fixed angle for the movie’s entire 105-minute duration without moving.
It’s not so strange after a while – so bursting with life is each shot and vignette – but there’s a gnawing feeling that we’re in some sort of film experiment, like testing an audience on how long they’ll watch old security camera footage. The camera may not move but the eras do, melting back and forth in time from pre-history, to the 1700s, to the 1940s, back to hunter-gatherer times and then the ’60s and ’70s, before hitting the early 1900s. It begins and ends in 2022.
Hanks and Wright form the movie’s spine, as Richard and Margaret. Over dozens of little scenes, we watch him as a boy grow up in the house and fall in love with Margaret, marry, move her in, have a baby and inher.