LOS ANGELES, Oct. 26 (UPI) -- Forrest Gump, for better or worse, captured what the '50s through '80s meant to America. In Here, which premiered Friday at AFI Fest, the same filmmakers spread themselves thin trying to capture centuries.
The premise is that the camera remains fixed on a single location for the entire movie as it evolves. For most of the movie, it is a living room, but it sometimes flashes back to when it was a colonial plantation or forest inhabited by Native Americans.
The families who lived in the house in the 20th century begin with John Harter (Gwilym Lee), a pilot, and his wife Pauline (Michelle Dockery). The next residents are Leo Beekman (David Fynn), who is inventing the La-Z-Boy recliner, and his wife Stella (Ophelia Lovibond).
Al (Paul Bettany) and Rose (Kelly Reilly) move in after he's discharged from World War II. Their son, Richard (Tom Hanks) grows up in the same house and marries Margaret (Robin Wright).
The technical gimmick of unfolding the entire movie in a single, unmoving frame is easy to follow. Smaller windows in the screen open up revealing transitions into different eras, and computers surely ensured the camera never moved by even a millimeter.
The format shortchanges the plot. It's hard enough to cover more than a century in under two hours, let alone when every major event has to occur in the same room.
As such, Here feels like a play made up of 30-second scenes with instantaneous scene changes. In those brief scenes, the characters discuss every major event that occurs in their lives.
Gump screenwriter Eric Roth's adaptation of Richard McGuire's graphic novel, co-written with director Robert Zemeckis, always feels like characters are rushing to cram every piece of information into a scene before they leave the room.
And yet, characters frequently make sure to drop "here" into conversation and comment on the passage of time. If this concept needs to explain that it's about the passage of time in a single place, then it's failed.
Like Gump, the film uses major historical events to indicate where the characters are in time. The Beatles appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show, the music Richard and Maragret's daughter listens to and aerobics on television indicate the '60s, '70s and '80s for example.
When Here flashes back to the American Revolution, it feels far less natural to hear William Franklin (Daniel Betts) complain about his brother Benjamin's politics. The Beekmans and Harters also feel like they're speaking in caricatures of old timey dialects.
It is also strange how loosely Here plays with certain history. Why deal with the inventor of the La-Z-Boy but make up a guy named Leo Beekman? Edwin Schoemaker and Edward Knabusch designed it in Detroit.
In rushing through the 20th-century storyline, we barely saw Richard and Margaret fall in love. Yet, attempts to broaden the scope beyond a White family suffer from gross oversimplification.
A Black family moves into the house after Richard and Margaret, but the film barely checks in with them.
It does show them having a very serious conversation about how to cooperate with police during a traffic stop. That's one of only two significant scenes of dialogue given to the Black characters.
In covering so much time, Zemeckis employs digital technology to allow older actors to play their characters younger. The technology has improved since even The Irishman five years ago, but the story fails to make a case for rendering Bosom Buddies era Hanks.
Anyone who considers the fate of Wright's Forrest Gump character to be misogynistic will have similar issues with her treatment in Here.
The experiences of generations over time are surely valid dramatic ones. Sadly, Here feels born of a technical idea and the actual narrative never feels inspired to justify it.
Here opens Nov. 1 in theaters.