“Here” reunites Zemeckis, screenwriter Eric Roth and actors Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, who collaborated on “Forrest Gump.” This time, they’re not telling a larger-than-life story of a man moving through time – they’re telling the age-old story of a living room and all the different people who live there.

In this living room, we see a wedding, a death, a birth, a marriage trial, a funeral, a lot of vacuuming, several birthdays, Christmas and Thanksgiving, some sex, adults getting drunk, and Jazzercise.

Zemeckis keeps the camera at a fixed angle without moving throughout the film’s entire 105-minute duration. After a while it’s not so strange – each shot and scene is so alive with life – but there’s a nagging feeling that we’re conducting some kind of film experiment, as if testing audiences whether they would listen to old security camera footage. For how long will we watch?

The camera may not move, but the eras do, moving forward in time from pre-history to the 1700s, the 1940s, the hunter-gatherer period, and then the early 1900s to the ’60s and ’70s. Keep melting behind. It will start and end in 2022.

Hanks and Wright as Richard and Margaret form the backbone of the film. In dozens of short scenes, we see him as a boy who grows up in the house and falls in love with Margaret, marries her, takes her in, has a child and inherits it all. . It is not guaranteed whether they will survive as a couple or not.

Zemeckis is a filmmaker known for incorporating the latest technology and this time it’s coming down to visual effects, basically recreating what 68-year-old Hanks looked like while filming “Splash.” Has gone. It’s a lot of work, often clumsy, and Zemeckis is lost in the uncanny valley, trying to tell a very human story about what unites us but changing the actors so much that the human connection is lost. Look closely and you’ll see that cigarette smoke goes into a container, but never comes out.

Other roles include Richard’s parents – played brilliantly by Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly – and some unrelated people: a fun couple living in the house from 1925 to 1944, and a less fun one in the early 1900s. couple. There’s an indigenous couple from the 1600s hanging out in the space that the living room will take up in 300 years and another family hanging out at home in 2020 amid the pandemic.

If that’s not enough, we have the presence of Benjamin Franklin. Why Benjamin Franklin? It is attached to the house across the road. What he says is not entirely clear. The film could have done with less cute touches like the Founding Fathers and hummingbirds.

We see the living room as the TV — the Beatles’ performance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” leads to “Chips” — and the vehicles outside go from horses to Model Ts to sedans. The home has grown from $3,400 just after World War II to $1 million today, and fashion ranges from Victorian heels to teased hair and American flag shirts.

“Here” – based on the graphic novel by Richard McGuire – is best when events from different times are combined – such as when a roof begins to leak in one era and a pregnant woman dissolves in water, It breaks in the second era. Or when influenza is mentioned in 1918 and we later see the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

One theme that is touched upon, but which could have been strengthened, is the impact of downsizing and economic disruptions on the psyche, with Richard’s father in full Willy Loman mode one day, crying after being fired from his job: ” They belittled me.” Delayed dreams are another thing, but there ain’t enough time for that if you’ve got Benjamin Franklin’s silly meetings. And while it does include Native Americans, the scenes add little to the narrative.

“Here” fails to connect all these centuries of human experience, other than to celebrate the human experience in all its messiness, triumphs and sadness. In fact, if these walls could talk, most of the characters are happiest away from this living room. Perhaps the strongest theme is expressed by a character lamenting: “Time just flies.”

Zemeckis nicely replicates the use of sections of the graphic novel within the frame that illustrate what’s happening in different eras – such as the little time travel devices – and kudos to Jesse Goldsmith for the superb editing work.

But one visual trick sums up the film: It’s supposed to be set in a real wood-and-brick house, but it was filmed on Sony’s studio campus in Culver City, California. The main character is fake. “Here” is nowhere.

“Here,” the Sony Pictures release which premieres in theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 for “thematic material, some suggestive material, brief strong language and smoking.” Running time: 105 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.

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