Tom Hanks’ ‘Here’ Divides Viewers but its Message is For Everyone
By: Laura Bennett
Robert Zemeckis’ new film Here, will be one of the most divisive of the year, not because of its subject but because of how it chooses to tell its story.
Based on the comic book by Richard McGuire, Here follows multiple generations of couples and families as they inhabit the same home over a century.
Woven together with flashbacks of the ice-age and Native-American settlement, stories about Benjamin Franklin’s illegitimate son and the invention of the Lay-Z-Boy chair, Here captures overlapping snippets in time thorough one frame in one loungeroom and how they intersect.
The Guardian has already dubbed Here as a misfiring flop and, knowing so much of cinema these days is about reliably getting bums on seats and dollars in pockets, deviating from readily consumable formats could be risky.
We shouldn’t write Here off entirely, though.
Director Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Castaway) uses the leeway he’s been given with good intention. Reuniting Tom Hanks and Robin Wright (Forrest Gump) Here condenses the passage of time and gives you a voyeuristic lens into the consequences of how we handle it.
Like a play, Here’s characters look past you while you sit right in front of them, close, but unaware of your presence.
You’re never totally involved in their lives – the style creates distance – but that’s almost the point, as these people are just others passing through the world as many have done before and will do afterwards.
Milestone moments of birth, death and marriage feel remote and common. It’s what links so many of the family’s experiences, and by showing that it seems Here is trying to communicate what James 4:14 has long declared: life is a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.
There’s something so transient about life, so where is its meaning?
Here isn’t somber, but its style quickly contrasts the hope of youth with the fears of aging, the desire to “do life right” and the realisation that the “right way” doesn’t always deliver the right outcome. One of Tom Hanks most powerful lines acknowledges the cost of worrying and how it “didn’t prevent [him] from pain”.
Matthew 6:27 & 34 immediately come to mind: “Can you by worrying add a single hour to your life?… “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own”.
There’s something powerful about seeing a lifetime in glimpses. We see the juxtaposition of generational commonalities with social evolution, and we’re forced to ask, what’s the point? What’s important and what are we aiming for? What fights are worth having and what ones should be let go? What’s the risk of waiting when life really is fleeting?
Zemeckis’ method may frustrate some viewers and disrupt the usual cinema experience, but if Here’s message can land it’s one worth hearing.
Here is rated M.
Article supplied with thanks to Hope Media.
All images: Movie Publicity
About the Author: Laura Bennett is a media professional, broadcaster and writer from Sydney, Australia.
