‘Here’ Review: Life Is Like a Box of Regrets

“Here” is an aeon-spanning experimental collage by Robert Zemeckis that plants the camera in one spot for give-or-take three billion years. The lens is static; the span, epic. An acre of New Jersey braves meteors, an ice age and dinosaurs. Sometime between the Pleistocene and Columbus, a deer tiptoes past. Alan Silvestri’s score swells triumphantly. Evolution!

Mostly, however, we’re staring at two houses. The first was erected before the American Revolution and belongs to William Franklin (Daniel Betts), a British loyalist who calls his kite-flying father Benjamin Franklin (Keith Bartlett) a terrorist. Secure in its place in history, the colonial mansion lords its importance over the second house, the lesser house, that you’d never drive out of your way to visit. But these humble digs are the star. Around 1900, the home’s walls get built around the camera, and in turn, the film builds itself around the mundane goings-on inside. Hovering midway between the sofa and the kitchen, we witness a century-plus of holidays, lazy days, kisses, arguments. Nothing worth a commemorative plaque. It’s a tribute to banality.

Richard McGuire’s groundbreaking graphic novel of the same name and conceit used comic panels as a special effect, overlapping anonymous figures into a blurry rumination on time. One page illustrates the chronic popularity of Twister. Another captures the progression of swears: “Nincompoop.” “Dweeb.” “Dirt bag.”

Zemeckis can be more interested in pixels than people. But this time, he wants recognizable people, too — heck, he wants movie stars — so he and Eric Roth tighten the screenplay’s focus to one family across six decades. There are glimpses of other characters: two Indigenous lovers (Joel Oulette and Dannie McCallum), a snippy suffragist (Michelle Dockery), a jazzy inventor and his wife (David Fynn and Ophelia Lovibond), and a modern family (Nicholas Pinnock and Nikki Amuka-Bird) who exist so close to our era that they come across bland.

The design team does a fantastic job delineating the years. Yet, the film treats everyone else like parentheses around the baby boomers Richard and Margaret (played by a de-aged Tom Hanks and Robin Wright), who fall in love as teenagers. Infatuated and naïve, Margaret coos, “I could spend the rest of my life here.” Cut to the young couple pregnant and married (in that order) and inheriting both the furniture and the mistakes of the groom’s parents (Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly).