Here
A movie review by Alex Firxt
In 2002, the tense thriller Phone Booth, starring Colin Farrell, Keifer Sutherland, and Forest Whitaker, was centred around, you guessed it, a phone booth.
Now, 22 years later, the drama Here, starring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, is centred around the lounge room of a house built in 1900.
It is about the people who lived and roamed in that space dating back to the formation of Earth.
It features a volcanic eruption, the Ice Age and dinosaurs roaming the planet.
Successive generations then made a home there.
Here is their stories, particularly that of Richard (Hanks) and his wife Margaret (Wright) and Richard’s parents, Al (Paul Bettany) and Rose (Kelly Reily).
It is also about their predecessors, including Pauline (Michelle Dockery), who plays the fretful wife of a pilot in the early 20th century.
In the case of Al and Rose, he fought in WWII and came back partially deaf with bomb fragments in him after a shell exploded near him.
With undiagnosed PTSD, he self-medicates with alcohol.
They bought the house when Rose was three months pregnant (with Richard) in 1945. Richard was one of their three children.
Margaret moves in with Richard and his parents after she falls pregnant to Richard when he is 18.
Richard aspires to be an artist, but with financial stability a major concern ends up taking a finance sector job.
She is desperate to move out, but circumstances see otherwise and as time goes on marital pressures mount.
Here reunites the director, writer and stars of Forrest Gump (1994).
Co-writer (along with Eric Roth and Richard McGuire) and director Robert Zemeckis has adapted a graphic novel by Richard McGuire.
It is a whole of life or, in this case, whole of lives story, incorporating highs and lows, love and loss, joy and sorrow.
We move back and forth in time through a series of vignettes, some short, others extended.
That is how we come to piece together the various family stories, some better told (with more detail) than others.
I must say I didn’t think we needed to get back to the formation of the planet or the prehistoric age.
As a device, I thought that went too far and didn’t really work. It looked clunky.
So, too, the representation of Benjamin Franklin.
Some of the acting, too, was less convincing than it should have been. It felt forced.
I am not suggesting all the characters were like that though, simply that I recognised the unevenness in the performances.
What did work remarkably well was turning Hanks back into a young man. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to reverse the ageing process so readily?
It took me some time to get into the rhythm of the film. In fact, at first, I was quite frustrated by its bitsy nature, although I found myself warming to it more as time passed.
Overall, then, I regard Here as a bold undertaking that doesn’t quite hang together as well as it might have.
Still, it certainly captures the transitory nature of our relatively short time here (hence the title).
Rated M, Here scores a 6 out of 10. 104 mins
