Here: one-room journey through American history lapses into gimmickry

“I could spend the rest of my life here,” says Margaret, a teenager played with a garish digital facelift by Robin Wright, as she snuggles up to her high school sweetheart Richard (Tom Hanks, given the same eerie CG botox treatment) early on in Here. It’s the mid-1960s, they’re in the chintzy living room of his parents’ house in picket-fence Pennsylvania, and she’ll come to regret the impetuous romantic hyperbole of her words, since Robert Zemeckis’ peculiarly tricked-out slab of everyday Americana will take them very much at face value.

The film counts on its audience being likewise content to remain in that unremarkable room. Here is adapted from Richard McGuire’s celebrated graphic novel of the same title, which observes millennia of activity – but principally the last century – from the same fixed point in space, as time whirs rapidly past it. A dinosaurs’ stomping ground becomes a Native American ritual location, then the estate of colonial governor William Franklin, then a middle-class family home inhabited by successive vessels of suburban American tragedy. 

There’s a poignancy to the conceit on the page, a rigidity and repetition that reflects the pace of social and historical change – dully slow as experienced in real time, but seismic in the long view – as if moving through a flipbook in very slow motion. But it would take a more austere experimentalist than Zemeckis to translate this simple high concept to screen without lapsing into outright gimmickry. A filmmaker long preoccupied with technological advancements at the expense of human investment, he seizes on McGuire’s unassumingly expansive work as a vehicle for more state-of-the-art effects – from that aforementioned uncanny-valley de-ageing to gaudily animated visions of pre-Big Bang America – than it can reasonably bear. Even common greenery is synthetically rendered, simply because it can be. Rather than a paean to the passage of ordinary life, it becomes a relentlessly extraordinary imitation of reality, offering much to gawk at but little to feel.

A valentine to homely middle-American endurance bedecked with all manner of digital fakery? Sounds a lot like Zemeckis’ Oscar-guzzling 1994 colossus Forrest Gump, and not coincidentally so: self-consciously evoking Gump from its 30-year reunion of Hanks and Wright to its generation-skimming soundtrack of pop staples, Here aims for the same broad-brush, time-capsule symbolism as its predecessor, packaging the supposed spirit of a nation into its characters’ heavily-stretched lives. This time, however, the audience assumes Gump’s role as passive witness to history; those on screen remain largely housebound, their lives cramped and frustrated for it.

The bulk of Here is centred on one extended family. Cranky Second World War veteran Al (an overbearing Paul Bettany) and his wife Rose (Kelly Reilly) buy the house in the first flush of the baby boom. When their son Richard accidentally impregnates Margaret in their last year of school, the young couple hastily wed and raise their daughter under the same roof. Plans for a home of their own are mooted, even drawn up, but never realised; Richard and Margaret’s marriage sours and splinters as she realises that’s all there is. Here could be quite effective as an elaborate visual metaphor for the trap of the modern American dream, but Zemeckis and co-writer Eric Roth – another Gump alum – can’t resist sentimentalising even Margaret’s unrest and epiphany, toward a treacly coda insisting she was happiest here all along. 

Away from this tepid marital saga, a non-linear narrative structure darts haphazardly between superficially drawn vignettes of family life from other eras – via an intricate editorial device of frames within frames that nods to the film’s comic-book roots. Inconsequential comedy is provided by the antics of a zany pre-war inventor and his pin-up model wife as he develops the prototype of the La-Z-Boy recliner; hollow topicality by the African-American family that buys the house from Richard and is subsequently charged with shoehorning a Black Lives Matter narrative into scant minutes of screen time. No less cynical and unearned is a scene depicting a pre-colonial Indigenous burial ceremony: a decorative demonstration of grief for people the film never bothers to name or know.

If Here exposes the limits of its pale, conservative worldview the more it widens its scope, it’s no better at capturing domestic intimacy – as the film’s defining master shot becomes more reminiscent of a stagy proscenium arch. Even when not hampered with virtual youth serum, Hanks and Wright’s performances are constricted by the script’s allegiance to dated archetypes and pat homilies. Home is where the heart is, the film would have us believe, but the soul has done a runner.

► Here is available in UK cinemas from 17 January.