ZERO STARS/****
starring Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Paul Bettany, Kelly Reilly
screenplay by Eric Roth & Robert Zemeckis, based on the graphic novel by Richard McGuire
directed by Robert Zemeckis
by Walter Chaw If it were only vapid, insipid, faux-high-concept middlebrow treacle, then fine, you know, that’s between you and your withered stump of low-aspiring taste. If it were only a terrible concept done terribly, a body-temperature tongue-bath delivered without enthusiasm or interest, well, then, so be it; I have liked too many of Robert Zemeckis’s movies to muster up the energy to go after a genial tapestry of sopping Hallmark platitudes–especially those that make idiots happy. Happy is in short supply, after all. If it were merely mildly pathetic in its desperation to be liked; had it only avoided the deadly sin of also wishing to be relevant, wise, respected. But, alas, Here isn’t just awful by most measurable standards established over 130 years of this medium’s astonishing evolution–it’s didactic and self-satisfied about it. It’s the spiritual offspring of Paul Haggis’s Crash, another The Blind Side packed to the tippy-top with privileged foolishness in which the soft-pedalling of broad melodrama paints over history’s sins for the validation of one miserable, unmotivated white guy’s congenital lack of introspection and imagination. Who could’ve guessed that this film, widely touted as the reunion of Forrest Gump‘s writer, director, and stars, would be a redux of its messages, too? Has it ever occurred to you that you “never know what you’re gonna get” in a box of chocolates only if you refuse to read it?
Here is a fundamentalist interpretation of Wordsworth’s “story of place,” in which an acre of land is observed for around 70 million years, from the end of the Cretaceous period to the post-BLM 21st-century United States. Somewhere in there, a house is built across the street from the home of William Franklin (Daniel Betts), one of the illegitimate sons of Benjamin Franklin (Keith Bartlett). With the camera mounted, unmoving and unmoved, in a perfectly unexceptional living room, we are subjected to 100 minutes of Disney’s Hall of Progress, an AI-assisted roundelay of middle-class interior-design disasters throughout history. Worry not, it ain’t all wallpaper and trim. No, this God’s green acre was also once a sylvan love glen in which an idealized (and ideally voiceless) Indigenous couple (Joel Oulette and Dannie McCallum) share an idyllic love so pure that strings of flaxen silk fly from their perfect honey-kissed union’s proverbial chestnut ass. I did love a sequence where the Indigenous man sits sadly by himself while, superimposed via the magic of a dazzling new technology replicating the double-exposure, a bunch of Victorian school children encircle him singing “Ring Around the Rosie.” I love it because the song is about symptoms of the plague and the plague was one of our favourite tools in liquidating Native Americans. Is this on purpose? I don’t know. On the one hand, Zemeckis is certainly too smart not to know how vile this juxtaposition is if it’s not in the service of a greater point. On the other hand, Here is so fucking stupid it’s hard to know what it does or doesn’t know from one second to the next.
Luckily, Here manifest destinies the crap out of this allegory for all that is good and clean in nature (sorry, I mean “NATURE”), juxtaposing Native American Eden with serial adulterer and slave-owner Franklin’s enslaved men building William’s future home. I tried to find out the names of the actors playing the enslaved men but, as you might suspect, was unable to do so. I had an easier time learning the names of the six humans enslaved to Franklin: Joseph, Jemima, Peter, Othello, George, and Bob. Personally, I wouldn’t have compounded this effrontery by crafting them as anonymous ciphers in Forrest Gump II. Maybe I’m missing the point of this warm, heartfelt bit of colonialist excreta. What’s the point, again? Later, when a realtor (Jenna Boyd) stomps on the floorboards and declares the workmanship in this old house to be exceedingly sound, well, what I’m hearing is how this country’s sturdy foundations are sunk deep in the legacy of chattel slavery and genocide.
“C’mon, now, boy,” I can hear you cry, “what does all that have to do with the story of WASP-y Richard and his beautiful bride Margaret?” And all I can say is, if that’s the story you want to tell, why are you prefacing it with ancient depictions of Indigenous peoples and African-Americans? Maybe the question is the answer. Have it your way. Richard (Tom Hanks) is born in the house in Here, raised by crotchety WWII vet Al (Paul Bettany) and wannabe bookkeeper Rose (Kelly Reilly), along with a brother (Albie Salter) who goes to Vietnam and a sister, Elizabeth (Beau Gadsdon), who…squeezes a whoopee cushion to interrupt Richard plowing Margaret (Robin Wright) on Rose’s couch. Richard and a knocked-up Margaret get shotgun married, and Margaret tells Richard over and over again how much she wants to move out and find their own place, how she hates this house and feels trapped there, er, here.
After some predictable bullshit played like a community-theatre production of All My Sons, Richard gives up on his dream of being Edward Hopper and Margaret, because Zemeckis loves to punish Robin Wright, gets dementia. We see this coming because Rose keeps saying she’s forgetting stuff like where she lives or why she’s in a grocery store. The “happy ending” of Here is when Richard forces poor, addled Margaret back to the house she hated and wanted to escape her entire married life and coaxes her into remembering some minutia from their daughter’s childhood so that she, through gales of tears, declares in her confusion how much she loves “this house.” Elder abuse? Gaslighting? Narcissism of the most dire and revolting kind? You bet. The daughter of these two (Zsa Zsa Zemeckis)–who, offscreen, attends law school and is the apple of both of her parents’ eye but nary seen again once she leaves–should probably use some of her fancy lawyering and get her mother a proper guardian.
Did I mention the modern-day Black family, the Harrises (Nicholas Pinnock, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Cache Vanderpuye), who have apparently purchased this home as an investment property they plan on living in for a while before moving on? How they’re living there through the pandemic, which is important only because of the scene where their maid Racquel (Anya Marco-Harris) dies of Covid after declaring to the proscenium, “Egads! I smell nothing!” (I paraphrase.) It might be important, too, because there’s another bit where a turn-of-the-century aviator dies of the Spanish Flu. “Important” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, I don’t need to tell you. Anyway, time flies and seize the day and gather ye rosebuds and life is short, and through it all, this acre is still this acre. I thought a few times of the time-lapse they did on that episode of “Futurama” where Fry falls into suspended animation and two complete apocalypses happen before he’s thawed out.
I thought of it because, in 20 seconds or so, it says everything Here wants to say about time and how brief our lives are on the geological spectrum. But then we wouldn’t have this stale melodrama of history’s minorities and women fertilizing the ground from which Richard’s sad little bildungsroman might spring, crooked but bravely priapic, like a pale oak sapling emerging from a blanket of thick, rich, nurturing cowshit. (Hey, wait a minute: generations of people living in this place do mention a weird smell. I finally figured out what that is.) Imagine the prologue of Up if the wife kept trying to leave. Imagine if all of Back to the Future were just the photograph with various characters appearing and disappearing for two hours. And then there’s an Indian. And some slaves. And a hummingbird instead of a Gumpian leaf. But in the end, there’s Marty, and don’t you worry: he’s just fucking fine, because while this land was maybe not made for you and me, it was for goddamn certain made for he.
