Review: 'Here' — where Robert Zemeckis reunites with his 'Forrest Gump' stars and screenwriter — wallows in nostalgia, and a framing gimmick that gets old really fast

Director Robert Zebecks loves melding technology with his storytelling — and that has brought him glory and ignominy.

This can produce good movies, like the animated wonders of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” or the history-bending drama of “Forrest Gump” or the time-tripping antics of the “Back to the Future” trilogy. It can also overwhelm the story in a dump truck of gimmicks, like with the creepy animation of “Welcome to Marwen” or the stifling single-location conceit of his new drama, “Here.”

The setting for “Here,” taken from Richard McGuire’s graphic novel, is the living room of a house. Zemeckis and his co-screenwriter Eric Roth (his collaborator on “Forrest Gump”) start in 2024, as an old man arranges with a real estate agent to set up a couple folding chairs. 

Actually, the movie starts in the same spot, millions of years earlier, before there’s a house, and dinosaurs are running wild. Then we see a meteor, and fire, and an ice age — as if Zemeckis saw Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” and decided he should try to top it.

After the ice age, the movie shows us this spot as indigenous people hunt deer. Then American colonists — one the son of Benjamin Franklin, the dialogue tells us — have built a mansion in the distance. And, around 1900, a crew is building a sturdy brick house on the spot the cameras, and considerable computer graphics work, is showing us. 

The main period the movie shows us stretches from 1946 to around 2015, give or take. We see Al (Paul Bettany), a G.I. just back from World War II, and his young wife, Rose (Kelly Reilly), deciding whether to buy the house. They do, of course, and start their family. Their oldest, Richard, grows up to be a nice young man — played by Tom Hanks, often with the assistance of computer-aided de-aging — who brings a nice young woman, Margaret (Robin Wright), to meet his parents. 

Richard, the movie shows us, is an aspiring artist. His father is skeptical of his son’s sketching, and advises him to pursue a career that pays. When Richard, at 18, tells his parents that Margaret is pregnant, the living room plays host to a quick wedding, and Margaret moves in for the next few decades — though, as the narrative drones on, she grows increasingly unhappy there.

These scenes of Al and Rose, and Richard and Margaret, are intercut with other families who have lived in the house over the decades: In the 1910s, a would-be aviator (Gwilym Lee) and his plane-phobic wife (Michelle Dockery); an inventor (David Fynn) and his dance-happy wife (Ophelia Lovibond) in the early 1940s; and a prosperous Black couple (Nicholas Pinnock and Nikki Amuka-Bird) and their teen son (Cache Vanderpuye) in the 2020s, coping with COVID and the “Black Lives Matter” protests. These supporting stories are drawn as fleeting sketches that don’t connect with each other or the audience.

Zemeckis relies too heavily on nostalgia — and not just by reuniting with the co-writer and two main stars of his Oscar-winning movie, “Forrest Gump.” It also pops up in the endless stream of musical cues to shorthand the date of each scene. (For example, the backdrop of Richard and Margaret’s wedding is The Beatles’ 1964 performance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” which is also a reference to Zemeckis’ 1978 directorial debut, “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.”)

Zemeckis applies much attention to pulling off the technology to make the transitions between eras, including the extensive de-aging to show Hanks, Wright, Bettany and Reilly over decades. Unfortunately, the conceit gets tedious in about 20 minutes, leaving the moviegoer alone with a bland and cliche-filled story of Baby Boomer anxiety and thwarted ambition.

In “Here,” Zemeckis aims to show us slices of a normal life over centuries. The problem is that the movie misses the point that life is about moving forward — or moving anywhere at all, rather than staying anchored in the living room.

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‘Here’

★★

Opens Friday, November 1, at theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for thematic material, some suggestive material, brief strong language and smoking. Running time: 104 minutes.