“Here” Today, Gone Tomorrow

I wasn’t at all sure what I was going to feel about Tom Hanks’ latest film, directed by Robert Zemeckis and also featuring Hanks’ Forrest Gump co-star, Robin Wright. Frankly, Here sounded corny, if not downright weird: an entire movie in which the camera never moves, and the story toggles between various occupants of the very same place, from dinosaurs and Native Americans to disparate 20^th century families living in a large old house. All I could think of, going in, was a stage oddity by Thornton Wilder called The Skin of Our Teeth. In it, people representing Adam, Eve, and their kin somehow live both in the Ice Age and in what was, in 1942, the present day. The central theme? Survival.

 Here is based not on The Skin of Our Teeth but on a 2014 graphic novel by Richard McGuire, derived from his own comic strip. Clearly, its central topic is Time: how life evolves, personal values change and get overridden, individuals—no  matter how bright or how amiable—can’t stand up to time’s onslaught. It’s a motif that certainly has meaning for all of us. Poets have been writing about it for centuries. Here’s what  English poet Andrew Marvell published in 1681:  “At my back I always hear/ Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near.” (Marvell, it must be said, was trying to talk his coy mistress into bed by reminding her that youthful vigor doesn’t last forever. Yes, things change.)

 Zemeckis, who has never lacked for grand ambitions, seems determined to make a film for the whole human race. Certainly, while never moving from one fixed spot, he tries to cover a whole lot of ground. Along with the dinosaurs and Native Americans there are historical figures (Benjamin Franklin) and small children and decrepit oldsters and pioneer inventors and nice people who never quite amount to much of anything. The most recent owners of the house that becomes the film’s entire universe are African American. We learn frustratingly little about them, but I think they are popped into the story in an attempt to cover all (or, I guess, most) bases when it comes to American history.

 But most of the screen time belongs to the couple played by Hanks and Wright. Through the very latest in de-aging technology, we meet them as young high schoolers in love, with pretty blonde Margaret meeting her beau’s parents, a bitter World War II veteran (an impressive Paul Bettany) and his devoted wife. We watch over the years as Richard and Margaret come to share the house with his ageing father and mother. They celebrate a quickie wedding, then there’s the birth of a daughter; Richard’s frustration with his workaday job; Margaret’s chafing at the bonds of matrimony; illnesses and other setbacks, sometimes interrupted by the narrative’s bounce into the lives of other couples with other joys and challenges.

 At movie houses, all trailers are carefully selected to match the upcoming flick. It was obvious, when I saw Here that the multiplex honchos were unclear on what kind of audience would  be watching this film. So I saw a terrifying trailer about American neo-Nazis, and another about actual Nazis in World War II. Then there were spots for benign family flicks like Moana 2 and Wicked. Confusing? I, for one, think it’s my own age group that should respond most thoughtfully to Here. We remember Tom Hanks from movies like Splash and Big, when he was as youthful and lively as his de-aged self in early scenes from this film. And so were we.