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[COLUMN] A Lukewarm Defense of Here, Robert Zemeckis' Baby Boomer Elegy | by Darren Mooney
🕑 Added 2024-11-29 15:00:17 +0000 UTC
Note: This piece contains spoilers for Robert Zemeckis’ Here, which is now on video on demand. If you’re looking for a recommendation: it’s more interesting than it is good. (Conclave is the week’s better streaming release.) But, if you do opt to watch it, feel free to bookmark and come back to this piece.
Robert Zemeckis’ Here is a great concept trapped within a deeply frustrating movie.
The film’s central premise is ingenious. Loosely adapted from the graphic novel of the same name, itself extrapolated from a comic strip, the overwhelming majority of the film finds the camera rooted in the same place. The angle of that shot never really changes, allowing for two exceptions in the final stretch of the movie. Instead, the audience is asked to watch millions of years of history play out from a single vantage point, in what is now Pennsylvania.
It is a bold idea for a film. It sounds like an art installation, something as strange and bizarre as the Wachowskis’ Cloud Atlas or Andy Warhol’s Empire. However, Zemeckis is and always has been a populist filmmaker, and so Here contorts its premise into something closer to a more conventional four-quadrant hit with a fairly strong narrative threaded to it and exposition dialogue that is layered on so thick that even the least savvy viewer will never be lost in the time skips.
It seems like every conversation in the house built on that spot takes place not only in the same sitting room, but also in the same corner of the same sitting room. Characters who appear in the film don’t seem to have lives outside of the room itself: they eat there, they drink there, they dance there, they sleep there, they conceive children there. They don’t even leave the room to gossip about one another. Forget joy, hope, loss, love and life, it seems everything happens Here.
The script is almost comically blunt. At one point, in a sequence set during COVID, a cleaner (Anya Marco Harris) wearing a face mask stops to admire some roses in a vase. She panics, realizing she can’t smell anything. She then turns to the camera and states, “I can’t smell anything.” Richard (Tom Hanks) repeatedly reminds characters of things he has already said outside the room by saying them inside the room. At one point, his wife Margaret (Robin Wright) observes, “Richard always says things like that, which are kind of obvious.”
And yet, allowing for these very serious flaws, there is something strangely compelling about Robert Zemeckis’ Here, particularly in the context of the director’s larger filmography. Here feels like an obvious companion piece to Zemeckis’ classic Forrest Gump, not only reuniting the director with Hanks and Wright, but also with screenwriter Eric Roth. Just like Forrest Gump, Here stars Hanks and Wright as a pair of doomed baby boomer lovers caught in the midst of an American fairy tale.
Zemeckis is Hollywood’s definitive baby boomer filmmaker. Even more than his friends Steven Spielberg or George Lucas, Zemeckis is obsessed with the perspective of the generation born between 1946 and 1964. This has always been the case. His first film as director was I Wanna Hold Your Hand, which David Fear summarized as “a combination of burgeoning boomer nostalgia and go-for-broke slapstick.” That film followed a group of teens trying to gain access to the Beatles’ appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Here includes the broadcast of that episode, adding to the sense of the film as a bookend for Zemeckis.
Zemeckis’ most famous films are about the boomer experience. Tim Grierson and Will Leitch argued that Back to the Future is “a picture-perfect piece of baby boomer fantasia.” According to Tom Breihan, Forrest Gump “takes decades of American history—the entire baby boomer lifespan up to that point—and presents them as a greatest-hits slideshow.” It even applies to Zemeckis’ under-appreciated films. Michael Sragow complained of What Lies Beneath: “[F]rom empty-nest syndrome to the burden of living in a father's shadow, this movie's issues smack of a baby boomer gripe list.”
Even Zemeckis’ other interests can be understood through his fascination with the baby boomer perspective. Nick Pinkerton argues Zemeckis’ fascination with the Second World War – in his script for Spielberg’s 1941, and his direction of films like Allied or Welcome to Marwen – “connects to Zemeckis’s fascination—not uncommon among Boomers—with the war of his parents’ generation.” Tellingly, in Here, Richard’s father Al (Paul Bettany) is a veteran of the Second World War.
Here technically unfolds across millions of years of history, from the death of the dinosaurs to the recent global pandemic. There are recurring subplots, such as those focusing on aviation enthusiast John Harter (Gwilym Lee) and his wife Pauline (Michelle Dockery) or La-Z-Boy inventor Leo (David Fynn) and his pin-up model partner Stella Beekman (Ophelia Lovibond). There are interludes with indigenous tribespeople and William Franklin (Daniel Betts), the bastard son of Benjamin. However, the bulk of the story is focused on two generations of the Young family, Al and Richard.
The Young family provides the movie with its clear and linear narrative. There is a clear arc to their story. Here presents scenes from their lives, but the audience gets a real sense of continuity. In contrast, the snippets of other families living in the house feel more episodic and disjointed, more random and arbitrary. This applies to both past and future. African American family Devon (Nicholas Pinnock) and Helen Harris (Nikki Amuka-Bird) buy the house from Richard, but sell it shortly thereafter rather than leaving it to their children.
Here suggests that there are some broader universal aspects of the human condition that can be connected across time and culture. William Franklin struggles with his father Benjamin, just like Richard brushes up against Al. John dies of Spanish Flu, a century before the Harris family’s cleaner succumbs to complications from COVID. Across the centuries, babies are born and people die in that space. On a long enough curve, events recur.
However, the Young family is an exceptional case. Here suggests that the relative tranquility and stability that the Young family experienced across two generations was the exception rather than the rule. For most of its existence, this corner of existence was subject to extreme changes: it was a plain, then it was a forest, then it was a colonial mansion. There was constant change at an accelerated pace. It was developed and redeveloped, demolished and rebuilt. What the land was and what it could be was in flux.
When considering buying the newly-built house, John notes that it is conveniently located near the aerodrome. “Could come in handy,” he tells Pauline. “In the future.” She replies, “The future?” John insists, “That’s right Pauline. It’s the only direction we’re headed. And it’s happening right now, right here.” There is an incredible enthusiasm to that idea, and it arguably carries across to Leo’s innovation and experimentation. As soon as the La-Z-Boy is a success, Leo and Stella move on. Even sitting down, there was real mobility.
In contrast, once Al and his wife Rose (Kelly Reilly) buy the house, it becomes a lot more fixed. Much of Richard and Margaret’s story is about the fact that the younger couple have inherited this house from Richard’s parents and so are trapped by it. Margaret keeps insisting that they need to move, but they never can. “I need my own space, Richard,” Margaret tells Richard. “You and me, we need our own space.” The only changes that Margaret can make to the home are cosmetic, like swapping out Rose’s sofa.
This is where Here feels like it is in conversation with Forrest Gump. In Forrest Gump, the eponymous character (Hanks) was a wanderer. He drifted through American history. The film’s central metaphor was the image of a feather caught in a breeze, and that took Forrest from Alabama to Vietnam to China and beyond. Gump gets carried away in the grand sweep of history, connecting with everyone from Elvis Presley to John F. Kennedy to John Lennon.
In contrast, Richard remains firmly in place. He gets a deferment that prevents him from going to Vietnam. At her 50th birthday party, Margaret laments that she never did any of the things that she wanted to do, that she never travelled to France or studied law or even had her own place. While Forrest Gump brings Forrest back to his childhood sweetheart Jenny (Wright), Here ultimately suggests that Margaret needs to leave Richard in order to become her own fully-formed person.
One of the bigger arguments over Forrest Gump has always been the degree to which the audience is expected to take the film’s boomer fantasy seriously. The National Review listed the film as one of the most conservative movies of the quarter-century following its release, while Dave Kehr introduced it at The Museum of Modern Art as “a darkly satirical vision in the guise of folk wisdom.” It’s tough to get a read on Forrest Gump. Is it baby boomer nostalgia or acidic deconstruction?
The best answer to that question might be a simple “yes.” The film’s treatment of Jenny certainly reads like a reactionary rejection of the 1960s counterculture, but there is also something deeply cynical in the film’s argument that the perfect avatar of postwar America was a man without any real capacity for independent thought, let alone understanding personal or political history as a series of complicated interlocking events. History happens to Gump. He does not make things happen.
There is a similar push-and-pull in Here, which feels like a eulogy for the baby boomers. It is a film about how that generation was present and occupied a central role in American life, but was also ultimately a historical blip – an exceptional case that has arguably already faded into history. Here suggests that the stability enjoyed by the Young family is a byproduct of and metaphor for “the American Century”, the period of prosperity and opportunity after the Second World War. Young can only buy the house because of the G.I. Bill.
Because nothing in Here is allowed to remain subtext, this point is made explicit. The conflict between William and Benjamin Franklin is over the American project. Paradoxically, the younger William is a royalist, believing in inherited power, while Benjamin argues for democracy. Centuries later, Margaret’s life coach (Angus Wright) explains to Richard, who inherited the house from his father, that his marriage is falling apart because he is refusing to treat it like a democracy.
Here is ultimately the story about being trapped and confined within systems and structures that have been inherited from an older generation. It’s about the premature ending of “the American Century”, and the fear that the architecture that the modern generation has inherited from their predecessors is stagnant and suffocating. It taps into the feeling, expressed in a recent study published in The Stanford Center on Poverty & Inequality Pathways Magazine, that the quality of life for children as compared to their parents has “drifted downward since” the late 1930s.
Zemeckis is inherently sentimental. Margaret leaves the house and Richard eventually sells it, but the pair return in their old age. Margaret is suffering from dementia, and Richard wants to help jog her memories. The couple spend one last half hour in the home together. However, there are signs that Zemeckis is perhaps willing to move on. For the first time, the camera moves. It pushes out of the house. It leaves Margaret and Richard behind, and finds a fresh angle. There is no more future left in the house. There is only the past.
Zemeckis can’t resist the urge to engage in some treacly nostalgia, but it seems notable that Here ends with both the Harris family and the audience opting to abandon the Young household, to no longer be defined by it. In its final moments, after decades of baby boomer angst, Here argues that it’s time for a fresh perspective.
Comments
JR
Then I offer my heartfelt respect for your efforts do dig deep enough to get so many nuances! As someone following a US entertainment outlet (Second Wind) from Europe, I can't argue with the ubiquity-argument. But even noticing the references (those which are more than memes) and then digging deep enough to say something of value about the piece of media referencing them yourself (not just repeating US media about it), surely takes a lot of effort. It's nice to profit from it as a reader/viewer. (PS: But who will do that for Irish pop culture if not the Irish! ;) )
Darren Mooney
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed!
Lil' Cass
Thank you for this column Darren💖
Darren Mooney
Researching tomorrow's column, there was a quote I found from Lars Von Trier about his work in the 2000s, and he was asked why it resonated so strongly with Americans and why it felt like it was so much stuff about America in there. And he made the point that, outside of America - particularly in Europe - American culture is so ubiquitous that you just absorb it. And I do think there's also a thing where, if you don't casually get the references, you are inspired to dig into it a bit deeper and engage with it more actively than passively in an attempt to understand it. I suspect I write better on American pop culture than on Irish pop culture!
JR
Thank you, Darren, for the thought-provoking piece! I wonder how it is to you, Darren, to write so often about the US and the introspection done there by way of films and series - while yourself looking in from the outside (and to you US-Americans reading Darren's takes there)... To me, it often feels like you hit the nail on the head - but I write that as an outsider myself. Have you ever written/talked about this overall challenge somewhere in a bit more depth? If not so, please do some day! (Also: Here is a title that makes every other sentence in a written piece about it weird. I respect the choice to constantly repeat the title in the text! ;) )
