‘Here’ Is the World’s Saddest Zillow Ad Starring Tom Hanks

Loiter on any patch of land for a few hours, and you can feel centuries of history quietly thrumming beneath your feet. Stand in the corner of a suburban house on a lot that was once nothing but barren, ashen ground and will, several million years into the future, be blessed with the name “New Jersey,” and you’ll witness life in all its wonder, sorrow and glory. Dinosaurs stomp past, ice ages come and go, indigenous people hunt for food. Rebels fight the redcoats, Ben Franklin bitches about his politically backward son, and America gains its independence. Man takes to the skies in those magnificent flying machines, the La-Z-Boy recliner is invented, and on a “radio with pictures” over in the corner, four dudes from across the Atlantic play The Ed Sullivan Show. Pandemics come and go. Marriages begin and end. Tom Hanks wears a faded Doors t-shirt and screams at a therapist.

The idea of viewing eons of existence on God’s green earth from a single vantage point was the basis for Richard McGuire’s extraordinary 2015 graphic novel Here, which used its panels to collapse time and make readers feel as if they were watching everything that had occurred on that acreage all at once. Robert Zemeckis‘ Here, the cinematic adaptation of this comics-lit landmark, uses this same formal idea to reunite his Forrest Gump cohorts and remind you that the baby-boom generation sure had its share of cool pop culture and late-in-life disillusionment. The gap between the above descriptions of those two works pretty much tells you everything you need to know about why this movie version falls a little short. On the page, the limitations somehow feel groundbreaking and expansive. Onscreen, the film somehow reduces the same notion of one angle/one thousand different moments to little more than a blinkered gimmick.

Which is probably to be expected when the focus is largely kept not just on one family who occupy the house built on that space for decades, but on one couple within that family. Hanks is Richard, a postwar kid-turned-white-collar-everyman who gives up dreams of becoming a graphic artist to provide for his family. Robin Wright is Margaret, his high school sweetheart who will become his wife, the mother of his child and a stand-in for the frustrations of modern women circa 1968-1988. They’re the anchor to the movie’s time-flipping and mixing and matching of eras, with Zemeckis and his Forrest Gump scribe (and strong contender for greatest contemporary Hollywood screenwriter) Eric Roth replicating the patchwork storytelling and inter-frame transitions of the book. A vertical rectangular panel of a Christmas tree in 1957 may appear in the middle of a scene set in 1917, or 1977, or 1697, instantly connecting the temporal dots. A Model T glides by a picture window looking out on the street one second, then one near-invisible wipe later, a Chrysler LeBaron passes the other way the next. Etc., etc.

Editor’s picks

And as in McGuire’s novel, Here sprinkles various recurring faces here and there to act as quick, easy signifiers of whatever year the spinning wheel of time stops on. Some, like the Lenni-Lanape duo (Joel Oulette and Danni McCallum), barely register as character sketches. Others, such as the Revolutionary War-era cameo of one of the country’s founding fathers, are little more than walking, talking punch lines. A 1940s boho couple (David Flynn and Ophelia Lovibond) exist solely to set up that invention-of-the-La-Z-Boy gag. Blink, and you’ll miss Michelle Dockery as a wife worried about her pilot husband in the late 1910s. Get to the film’s are-you-kidding-me introduction of Covid-19, and you’ll wish you had blinked and missed it. We’re torn between being happy about the inclusion of Black parents (Nicholas Pinnock and the always great Nikki Amuka-Bird) having a conversation with their teen son about what to do if he’s stopped by a police officer, since it does widen the scope of the film and acknowledge a bigger social picture outside of the always static composition, and feeling embarrassed about how badly that scene is presented. There are more cringe moments throughout than you’d care to count.

Trending Stories

Related Content

But this was never meant to be an ensemble project, and the movie clearly knows who its big guns are — even Paul Bettany and Yellowstone‘s Kelly Reilly, respectively playing Richard’s alcoholic WWII veteran father and his long-suffering mother, become little more than supporting players in the younger couple’s story. And trust us, it will be shameless in the manner in which it uses these movie-star Howitzers to attack your heartstrings. You can feel Here straining to be something like an Ok, Boomer take on Scenes From a Marriage, charting the cracks in their relationship in between the ever-evolving TV programming (The Honeymooners! The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show! Chips!) and the constantly devolving digital de-aging to which it subjects the leads. That the uncanny-valley smoothness of the younger version’s mugs is indeed distracting isn’t surprising, but the fact that this aspect is only the second worst thing about this movie is a shock. We’d rank “being stuck in the world’s saddest Zillow ad” right above it.

At one point, a character looks around the four walls that have housed many generations of Garden State inhabitants, and declares that there’s nowhere else they’d rather be. Long before they utter that phrase, however, you, the viewer will silently wish you were anywhere else but Here.