Review: Robert Zemeckis, Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, And A Must-See Deleted Scene Are All ‘Here’ On Blu-ray
by David Lewis
Writer-director Robert Zemeckis has spent his career creating crowd-pleasing spectacles using the latest visual effects trickery, from Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and the Back to the Future trilogy to CGI monstrosities A Christmas Carol and The Polar Express.
With Here, Zemeckis re-teams with Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, the stars of his biggest hit, 1994’s goopy nostalgia fest Forrest Gump.
The trio are also joined by more Gump alumni: writer Eric Roth, cinematographer Don Burgess, and costumer Joanna Johnston. Like the 1994 best picture Oscar winner, Here is an old-fashioned tale told with cutting edge technology, resulting in a curious and colossally corny stab at cinematic wonder that plays more like a cross between a living Hallmark card and a few particularly eventful rounds of The Sims.
Here takes place entirely in the living room of a New England house, built in 1900 in the shadow of a massive Colonial estate that belonged to Ben Franklin‘s son. The narrative jumps back and forth throughout multiple eras, depicting the home’s inhabitants, from an Edwardian Era couple (the wife is played by Downton Abbey‘s Michelle Dockery, whose career is seemingly trapped in that time) to a modern-day family — and stretching back to include the dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals and people who roamed the land millennia earlier. Eventually, around 1946 in movie time, we meet a young couple (Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly), raising their son Richard (Hanks) in the house. He eventually marries Margaret (Wright), and the couple eventually take over the deed together. The bulk of the running time depicts Richard and Margaret’s life together in the house.
Much of the film’s ambitious challenge is to tell the stories with a stationary camera taking it all in from one single, unchanging angle. Likewise, Zemeckis and his visual effects crew use de-aging technology in order to have Hanks and Wright play their characters from teens into the golden years, and the result is fairly convincing, but always unnerving. Hanks looks significantly more human than he did in The Polar Express, and overall the de-aging effects are an improvement on Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman. But it’s not enough to make up for a doggedly one-dimensional script.
A suspicious amount of major events happen in this modest living room; inhabitants get married, give birth, have strokes, have heart attacks, and have life-changing epiphanies all in the confines of the small space. The Big Moments don’t feel as big when there’s a Big Moment every three or four minutes. And, because of the stationary camera angle, characters have a tendency to move toward the camera in order to get a close-up for big line deliveries, stand awkwardly close to one another, or stare off onto space (where the kitchen seems to be).
For anyone interested in Here, the Blu-ray’s special features are a must. A 20-minute featurette exploring the complicated movie trickery that went into the film’s technical gambits is interesting enough. It reveals some neat, practically invisible physical effects, including the set’s forced perspectives, the use of an LED volume for the exteriors (seen through a big window), and the use of movable floor ramps so the actors’ height differences wouldn’t result in anyone having their head out of frame if they got too close to the camera.
The nine minutes or so of deleted material could really use an audio commentary or at least an intro for context. There are not one but two cut scenes of wallpaper being applied, for example. The main attraction, however, is a lengthy, apparently finalized (with effects and music) but cut scene that would have radically changed the mood of the film. Here ends on a schmaltzy note of Hanks and Wright looking over the house as they prepare to move (there’s actually more to it, but I don’t want to spoil it), but the final deleted scene reveals that eventually the house and its surroundings are destroyed by a Biblical flood, leaving only the Franklin Estate’s chimney standing. Some time later, the water recedes and nature begins a long reclamation of the land. It’s stirring and thought-provoking in a simple way, and brings it all full circle in a way the official ending just doesn’t. Why they chose to cut it is a mystery.
Here is now available on Blu-ray and Digital.
