Maybe there is something new under the sun after all! After movies based on books, movies based on real life, movies based on other movies, movies based on TV, movies based on plays, movies based on comic books, movies based on radio shows and movies based on theme park rides, it might have seemed like a safe bet that people had run out of things to base movies on and might have to start making movies based on original ideas.

But never fear! One of cinema's great technical innovators is here with a real innovation: a movie based on a Graphical User Interface (or GUI for short, because I'm not typing that out every time). You're a smart cookie, you know what a GUI is; Windows is possibly the most ubiquitous example, as is the grid of little square-ish icons you have on your intelligent mobile telephone, should you possess one. I should possibly qualify what I just said by adding that the movie in question – Robert Zemeckis' Here – isn't a straight adaptation of Windows into a movie, but a film version of a book apparently inspired by Windows 2.1.

Does that sound weird? The really odd thing is that, for a movie based on a GUI, there are no computers in it really worth mentioning, although they do stick Tom Hanks' face into a computer for large chunks of the film. It opens with a cheerful rustic scene at the end of the Cretaceous period, with dinosaurs lolloping about enjoying their lives, before the KT event occurs and everything catches fire. Then there's an ice age (all this does not occur in real time, by the way) and then a forest grows – and all through this the camera does not move or change its focus in any way. Very soon some deer come along and a hummingbird, and then some Native Americans turn up, and eventually the area is colonised and Benjamin Franklin builds a big house there (he's only in the film for about as long as the dinosaurs though). The area gets developed and they eventually build a fairly nice, fairly big house there.

So far, so linear, though as I say there has been a fair degree of rushing-through to get us to this point. From here on, however, the film goes a bit non-linear, as we get to see incidents from the lives of four families living there over the course of a bit more than a century. Occasionally most of the screen will be showing a scene from, say, 1979, while a rectilinear chunk of it (this is the Windows influence) is showing 1942, for hopefully resonant dramatic effect.

Living in the house across the years, then, are a nice couple (Gwilym Lee and Michelle Dockery) where he is obsessed by the new invention of powered flight, while she is appalled by it; then the inventor of the La-Z-Boy chair and his wife (David Fynn and Ophelia Lovibond); then a salesman and his wife (the nearly always watchable Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly), who end up sharing the place with and then bequeathing it to their son and his wife (Tom Hanks and Robin Wright). It has to be said there are a lot of women in this film whose occupation is just 'housewife', but that's history for you I suppose. Bringing us sort of up to date, the last inhabitants are another couple who we see relatively little of, so it's entirely possible she is a Strong Independent Woman with her own career – they are played by Nicholas Pinnock and Nikki Amuka-Bird. Presumably at the very end of the film Donald Trump is re-elected and history comes to a grinding halt, but the script tries to be non-partisan.

And, you know, it's an interesting formal exercise for a movie to keep the camera entirely static for over an hour and a half (you know the thing's about to finish when suddenly it starts panning and zooming). You can see why it would appeal to Robert Zemeckis, who in recent years has become quite interested in this sort of challenge, although it does seem to me that Zemeckis did his best work as a director just telling a good story without all the fancy technical and stylistic whistles and bells – this is the man who directed Back to the Future, after all. I suppose it qualifies as one of the more faithful attempts at trying to bring a graphic novel to the screen – in this case, an acclaimed work by Richard McGuire – but to be honest the film does put me in mind of Alan Moore's various grumblings about how it's really impossible to capture all the potential for nuance in a serialised graphic narrative in any other format.

At least they have dialogue in most of the movie. I mention this because, when I have occasionally sat down and watched cavemen movies, it has struck me that removing conventional dialogue immediately compels the film to become terribly simplistic in its story and broad-brush with its characterisation. In the case of here, the film's formal conceit – which is, obviously, foregrounded, and feels somewhat contrived – results in the rest of it becoming equally artificial and, not entirely surprisingly, rather theatrical, with the screen becoming almost the equivalent of a proscenium arch. This affects a lot of the performances, which are on the broad side; for example, Bettany starts the film as a young war veteran who keeps shouting things like 'Gee willikers!'. Not that the plot isn't pulled about to fit the concept of the film – one character ends up getting pregnant, then married, then giving birth, and then first showing symptoms of a serious medical condition all on pretty much the same spot.

Perhaps this would not matter so much if the film was using its central device to actually make a significant point of some kind. But it isn't, as far as I can tell, beyond 'lots of people have led broadly similar lives throughout history'. The way the film is structured almost seems intended to suggest that Tom Hanks' character having some marital difficulties is the single most important thing ever to happen at this location, which seems somewhat unlikely – perhaps it would be better if the film just concentrated on the Bettany/Hanks family and forgot about all the other inhabitants, it might make the film feel a bit less portentous.

It would also solve the issue of the film's presentation of the Native American and African American characters, which is (at best) well-intentioned but really quite naive, perhaps shading even into patronising. Not very much happens to the final couple, they're just there from time to time, except for a couple of bits clearly meant to remind the audience of solemn modern facts about racism and the effects of Covid.

The film is technically quite deft and Tom Hanks very, very rarely gives a bad performance – but I got restless during it very quickly and started wondering what the point of it really was. The co-spousal unit got genuinely cross with the way it wasted what she felt was an idea with much potential; it did occur to me this would be a brilliant way to tell a ghost story. But most of the time the film we have is groping for significant things to say about human life and resolutely not finding them.

Awix

27.01.25 Front Page

Back Issue Page