The Room Where It Happens
By Adam Nayman

Here
Dir. Robert Zemeckis, U.S., Sony Pictures

Robert Zemeckis is as Robert Zemeckis does. At this point, you pretty much know what you’re going to get; the question is what to do with it. Insofar as the director’s new movie Here has a thesis, it might be—to paraphrase both Scottish historian James Fullarton Muirhead and Bart Simpson—that America is a Land of Contrasts. The same goes for Zemeckis’s cinema as a whole, with its burnished, sterile sheen of technologized nostalgia and curious, sometimes potent tonal admixture of sarcasm and sentimentality, a Mad Magazine parody of Spielbergian agape (as in Back to the Future and Contact) made hypothetically more biting—or toothless—by its maker having been mentored and patronized by Spielberg himself.

Such contradictions are catnip to a cinephile community whose appetite for a vulgarized auteurism has, predictably, swung decisively and decadently in the other direction—away from putative neo-B-movie termites like John Hyams or Jaume Collet–Serra and towards lumbering studio pachyderms recently put out to pasture. Over the past few years, battle lines have been drawn online between various circles and squares. The range of negative responses to Zemeckis’s recent work, despite its steady stream of A-list stars and ostensibly populist content, feels not coincidentally synced to the indifference of the marketplace; the majority critical view, which ranges from coolly unsympathetic to downright hostile, is that the director is an aging technocrat stranded on the wrong side of the uncanny valley, cut off from his instincts as a satirist and peddling tacky simulacra into infinity, an understandable response to the frieze-dried likes of Beowulf (2007) and A Christmas Carol (2009), or Pinocchio (2022).

For a small but vocal contingent of Zemeckis truthers, rallied mainly around the noble personage of Dave Kehr, who curated an influential 2015 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, such imitations of life are legible as self-reflexive interventions into what it means to (re)print our legends through a digital lens, while hybrids like Allied (2015) and Welcome to Marwen (2018) aren’t just critical stalking horses but genuine, if strangely mutant, thoroughbreds. As such, they are solid bets for polemicists jockeying for attention. Nick Pinkerton rode to the rescue for Welcome to Marwen on this very website, while in MUBI, Christopher Small characterized its maker as an “immodest, quixotic commercial artist, full of risk and failure, with a tin-ear to what constitutes popular appeal.”

The key point here is the last one, which insinuates that any director who has so clearly demonstrated a mastery of multiplex and industry metaphysics as Zemeckis, only to lapse into mainstream-punchline status, hasn’t lost his touch so much as found it, along with an edge to help separate the wheat from the chaff, interpretively speaking.

Here, adapted by Zemeckis with Eric Roth from Richard McGuire’s acclaimed 2014 graphic novel, is as flavorless and fungible as a freshly packaged loaf of Wonder Bread; it’s also a potential feeding frenzy for anybody inclined to sandwich juicy, flame-broiled meanings in between its slice-of-life dramaturgy. “I brought home our favorite breakfast,” proclaims Richard Young (Tom Hanks) to his wife Margaret (Robin Wright Penn) before plopping down a greasy bag of fast food on the foldout table in the New England living room that serves as the story’s sole location, glimpsed at different points in time from the Cretaceous to COVID-19 from the same fixed camera perspective. For anybody inclined to read Here’s concentric array of story-within-stories—visualized, as per McGuire’s source material, via a series of frames within frames that variably collapse, syncopate, and stratify past and present—as an extended joke about how the arc of history, traced selectively and narrowed to a fine point of suburban, Yankeeland exceptionalism, bends towards McDonald’s, the film could seem to be a bleakly funny tour-de-force—just as it’s possible, if not necessarily plausible, to read Forrest Gump as a burlesque of the bumper-sticker-wisdom that “Shit Happens” rather than a Boomer-centric capitulation to blamelessness itself.

That it’s next to impossible not to see Richard and Margaret as spiritual siblings—or maybe cosmic reincarnations—of Forrest and Jenny is a willful byproduct of a casting coup that tilts many of Here’s other elements in the direction of self-reflexive intentionality, and in a year where many of the most interesting movies exist on a spectrum of authorial self-portraiture (Juror #2, Megalopolis, The Shrouds), Zemeckis throws his hat into the ring; why yes, that is his wife Leslie in a (typical) cameo as Benjamin Franklin’s daughter-in-law Elizabeth in one of the parallel flashback narratives that trace the construction and proprietorship of the Young homestead, which is shown, in the present tense, to be facing the Founding Father’s colonial estate. The idea that the latter remains preserved as a heritage site—impervious to the manifold changes in culture, fashion, and ideology literally foregrounded by Here’s mise-en-scène as it juxtaposes domestic dioramas of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries—is complicated by the presentation of the land before the incursions of settlers; the sequences depicting the courtship, marriage, and family life of two Lenni-Lenape Indians raise the specters of displacement, slavery, and colonization without transcending their optics as politically correct pantomime—as annotations of guilt in the margins of a history written by, for, and about the winners.

The same goes—maybe—for certain of Here’s other plotlines, which exist on a periphery between cliché and critique, and always in counterpoint to the main action. The upwardly mobile African American couple that purchases the house from the Youngs are shown instructing their teenaged son on the optimal way to act during a police stop-and-frisk; their Latina housekeeper dies of COVID—at once linking her to other figures revealed as casualties of earlier epidemics and characterizing her as collateral damage in a larger drama of haves-and-have-nots. Again, one’s thoughts drift back to Forrest Gump, and specifically Mykelti Williamson’s dependable, existentially expendable Bubba, a Black man who dies so that his war buddy can enjoy the fruits of their shrimp-boating empire, or the Vietnamese woman whose marriage to the physically broken but admirably enlightened vet Lieutenant Dan symbolizes a psychic wound scabbing over. Forrest may not be a smart man, but, we are reassured, he knows what love is; in his case, it means never having to say you’re sorry when you manage to stay on the right side of history by either staying docilely in place or else running away only to learn that home is where the heart is—and that you can, actually, go there again.

Because Forrest Gump plays by the rules of picaresque—of a horizontal movement through time and space, mapped on a vertical axis (and access) of class—it’s easy to get caught up and ground down by its relentless, Top-40-scored momentum. It’s also accordingly tempting for left-leaning critics to try and act like sand in the gears of the ideological machinery, principled protestors staring down the barrel of the studio tank. Here, though, doesn’t work nearly as well as Forrest Gump, and it’s the very aridity of its emotional content, parched to desert-of-the-real levels by de-aging effects that render Hanks and Wright (and several of their co-stars) as weirdly artificial and subject to illusionistic manipulation as their environment, that is so startling—and, for the most part, beguiling. What does it mean to make a movie superficially predicated on the idea of relatability—of asking viewers to see themselves, or parts of themselves, in the upper-middle-class quotidian Youngs as they live, laugh, and love their way through a comfortable but increasingly unfulfilling existence in their own little corner of the world—where nothing, including the births and deaths that punctuate the action at regular intervals, feels remotely real?

Or, conversely: what does it mean to make a movie which suggests, quite literally on multiple levels, that relatability itself is superficial—a consumer-minded construct that renders touchstones like the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show tactilely anodyne precisely because they belong to Everyone, and thus no one—and then, by doing so, try to boomerang back on the grim reality of the human condition: that, with apologies to John Crowley and the season’s other episodic scenes-from-a-marriage-melodrama, we Live in Time, and it passes us by. The more I thought about Here and the various fleeting but piercingly specific narrative and character details we’re asked to sift through in order to give its impressionistic presentation meaning—and meaning-making, which is to say semiotics, is very much Zemeckis’s game, no matter how unpretentiously he frames his own practice—the more I felt mocked and brutalized. Richard's deferment of his artistic ambitions over the years to keep up with the proverbial Joneses not only alienates him from Margaret but also is repudiated by the exploits of one of the home’s previous owners, Leo (David Flynn), an inventor whose magnum opus of the La-Z-Boy recliner earns him fame, fortune, and the undying love of his smoking-hot pinup model wife (Ophelia Lovibond). All Richard gets for his stifled ambitions are tax bills, while Margaret’s realization during her 50th birthday party that she would like to see the world beyond her door is undermined by her contracting Alzheimer’s, so that her experiences vanish almost as soon as she’s had them—and also that the one thing she can remember, as shown in the coda, is the house she had nagged her husband to sell for so long.

Because it’s genuinely hard to gauge the quality of the performances in Here—the characters are too thinly written and the special effects are too distracting—Margaret’s fate made me think (again, probably on purpose) of Jenny, a victim of childhood sexual abuse who’s punished for her dalliance with countercultural movements (folk singing, antiwar activism) by contracting an AIDS-related illness after realizing that the mentally handicapped kid who used to sit next to her on the school bus has been her intended all along. “She was kind of selfish,” said Wright recently. “She was just flighty and running and doing coke and hooking up with a Black Panther, and then she gets sick and says, ‘This is your child. But I’m dying…’ and then he still takes her.” D. H. Lawrence reminds us to trust the tale and not the teller, but what about the actor? As for Hanks, his brand is trustworthiness, which is why he’s often at his best playing characters mired in self-delusion or else at loose ends (as in Captain Phillips [2013] and Sully [2016]), and probably why he manages to be affecting in Here—either in spite of the material, or in sync with it, or both at once. Richard is a man who gets everything he wants because he’s willing and able to pay for it, except that unlike Margaret, he lives in a state of petrification about the true nature of his investments. The payoff for holding down the fort, as it were, is diabolically in line with the story’s focus on shifting familial dynamics; he matures from an infantilized interloper in the starter home purchased for a song by his Greatest Generation parents to their landlord-slash-caregiver as they stagger off this mortal coil, leaving him to follow in their footsteps.

It’s in this context of exquisite morbidity that I found myself laughing out loud at Here’s final anti-grace note—the arrival of a hummingbird even faker than the one at the end of Blue Velvet, and also an escapee from Roth’s screenplay for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, itself a movie determined to simultaneously defamiliarize and deify the American experience. Back in David Fincher’s film, that hummingbird struck me as an anthropomorphized sop to Forrest Gump’s iconic, weightless feather and its synecdochic intimations of fate; it reminded me that a movie I more or less enjoyed in the moment shared DNA with one I hated. Fifteen years on—and considerably deeper into life, and therefore the sorts of compromises that Zemeckis so implacably and unpleasantly dramatizes in Here—I felt a different sort of jolt; one of true and lucid cruelty, of a movie looking its target audience squarely in the eye and smirking cheerfully, unafraid of whether they’ll see it for what it is, or even if they’ll see it at all. Meanwhile, the observation, made by a friend via text, that the one camera movement in a movie predicated on fixity—and which also mirrors Forrest Gump by hovering up into the ether against syrupy Alan Silvestri music—ultimately resolves itself by adopting the point of view of the colonial mansion across the street, looking down on the Young house as well as all the others like it, is proving hard to shake.