Robert Zemeckis’s sentimental family heartwarmer, adapted by him and co-screenwriter Eric Roth from the graphic novel of the same name by Richard McGuire, is the movie equivalent of a book club choice; the star is a family home, the “here” of the title. Or rather: it’s the living room in a Philadelphia house where so much generational drama plays out. Here is an odd combination of cosmic ambition and hyper-local domestic intimacy, clearly influenced at some level by Noël Coward’s play and movie This Happy Breed, about scenes in the life of a London family in the same house. The dreamy quirkiness keeps you watching and the folksy warmth of performances from Tom Hanks and Robin Wright encourage you to cut it some slack.
The film switches back and forth between eras, with scene-transitions managed with split-screens and inset-panels (a nod to its graphic-novel origins), using the same fixed camera position until the very end. It is sited in the specific “here” in prehistoric times, the American revolution, and when it is occupied by Native Americans (scenes imagined with weirdly childlike placidity). By the turn of the 20th century, it becomes a house, opposite the colonial mansion of William Franklin, pro-Brit son of Benjamin Franklin.
The house is first owned by an aviator and his unhappy family, then by the cheerful inventor of the La-Z-Boy recliner chair and his gleefully sexy wife (tellingly, they are the happy ones in this film … unencumbered by children). And then by careworn second world war veteran Al Young (Paul Bettany) and his wife, Rose (Kelly Reilly); Al and Rose’s son Richard and his young bride Margaret come to live with them in the cramped place, played by a digitally youthified Hanks and Wright. After they are gone, it has a vivid afterlife as the home of an African American family, presided over by Devon and Helen (played by Nicholas Pinnock and Nikki Amuka-Bird).
The living room, with its changing decor and furniture, keeps insistently just being there at various historical moments, placidly asserting its presence at historical times like an inanimate Forrest Gump. The TV will occasionally alert us to historical moments, but the movie gives us no hint of anything very important, like civil rights, the Berlin Wall coming down, or 9/11. There is laughter and there are tears, but mainly tears, from the two generations of Bettany’s Al and Hanks’s Richard; they are both men who sacrificed their dreams to become salesmen in the grim Willy Loman sense, while the womenfolk are poignantly fragile.
All the prehistoric and 1776 material is a bit extraneous, and the scenes with Native Americans are frankly perfunctory and glib; the film is really all about the stagey, hokey world of the postwar Young family, which feels like theatre, although the camera move at the end has an unselfconscious force. How would Spielberg have shot it? Perhaps by truncating or amputating the cosmic material and putting more emphasis on the lives of Richard and Margaret’s children.
• Here is in UK cinemas from 17 January.
