DAVID ADAMS watches the new film which reunites some of the key people behind ‘Forrest Gump’…
Here (AU – M/US – PG-13)
In a word: Ruminative
Tom Hanks stars as Richard and Robin Wright as Margaret in ‘Here’. PICTURE: Courtesy of VVS Films.
Here. which reunites director Robert Zemeckis with actors Tom Hanks and Robin Wright and screenwriter Eric Roth some 30 years after Forrest Gump, is an innovative piece of film-making. Tracing the story of a place – which happens to become the living room of a house built in 1900, the film tells the story of the people that have inhabited it.
“The power of this film lies in the way it captures the lives of those who live here – times of celebration and joy, moments of grief and pain, successes and missed opportunities and the mundane, everyday events and decisions which shape us and gradually build into a life.”
The film, which is based on a graphic novel by Richard McGuire, uses a single angle throughout (with a small exception), and doesn’t follow typically linear narrative but rather tells the story of the place’s inhabitants by ducking back and forth between their stories which are all being told, in a sense, at the same time.
The focus centres on the family of World War II veteran Al (Paul Bettany) and his wife Rose (Kelly Reilly) whose eldest son Richard (played as an adult by Hanks) marries Margaret (Wright) and who continues to live in his parents house with his wife and, eventually, daughter Vanessa (Zsa Zsa Zemeckis).
But we also encounter the home’s first owners, John (Gwilym Lee) and Pauline (Michelle Dockery), as well as an Indian couple who lived on the lands before any homes were built, a couple who lived in the home in the late 1930s and early 1940s (and who have a surprise claim to fame) and the most recent residents. There’s even a Benjamin Franklin link.
The power of this film, which paints a picture of life in soft-focus Americana, lies in the way it captures the lives of those who live here – times of celebration and joy, moments of grief and pain, successes and missed opportunities and the mundane, everyday events and decisions which shape us and gradually build into a life.
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Hanks and fellow actors (with the help of digital technology to take them backwards and forwards through time) put in polished if somewhat constrained performances thanks to the format which, despite the intimacy of being in their daily lives, keeps the audience at an arms length from the characters. Indeed, there’s a sense of a stage play here as we shift between different iterations of the same living room in the house.
Here, which sets out to play with our sense of sentimentality in a very deliberate but not ultimately overbearing way, is a cleverly constructed film, telling a story that is at once big picture and deeply personal. The subject matter means it should, at least in part, resonate with us all.