Here

At what point did Robert Zemeckis stop making movies and start executing gimmicks? I suppose all of his films have begun with a gimmick—as so many movies must. What if a kid goes back in time and accidentally keeps his parents from meeting? But at some point, the gimmick—often mistaken for artistic experimentation—overtook the story. Was it Polar Express? Was that the tipping point?

Here sees Zemeckis pointing his unmoving camera toward one single spot for one hour and 44 minutes.

That sounds like a stage play, doesn’t it? It’s actually Zemeckis and Eric Roth’s adaptation of Richard McGuire’s graphic novel. Zemeckis breathes some cinema into the static experience with artful cutaways to overlap time with place and spin the story of thousands of years of history taking place in this one single spot.

The bulk of that time is spent in a living room, camera pointed toward the picture window out of which we see the house that once belonged to Benjamin Franklin’s illegitimate son, of all things.

Though we travel back and forth through time, we sit mainly with one family. Al (Paul Bettany) and Rose (Kelly Reilly) buy the place with what Al received from the GI Bill after his stint in WWII. One moment they’re perching their baby Ricky for a Christmas photo, the next it’s Ricky and his baby sister by the tree, then a baby brother, and so time flies until finally Ricky brings home his high school sweetheart, Margaret.

High school Ricky and Margaret are played by Tom Hanks and Robin Wright (for all those who pined for a Forrest/Jenny reunion). They do not look like high school kids, and their voices are even less convincing.

As Zemeckis takes us forward and back through time, the fact that both leads always look like middle aged people does cause some confusion. But the two veteran actors are reliably great, as is Reilly and sometimes Bettany.

The rest of the ensemble doesn’t fare as well, often because the dialogue is so forced and stilted. Most scenes do little more than ensure that we recognize the important historical moments we’re witnessing: Covid lockdown, the Revolutionary War, the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, the comet that killed the dinosaurs (I swear to God). It’s like Zemeckis took the worst part of Forrest Gump and shoehorned it into this movie.

Like nearly everything the filmmaker has made in the last two decades (at least), Here feels hollow and slight, an experiment in technological execution rather than artistic experimentation.