There is something quintessentially American and straight out of Norman Rockwell about centering a multi-generational study around the living room, with idealized themes of home and family reinforced by scenes around the tree or the dining room table, fully fleshed out to accommodate the ever-expanding clan at Thanksgiving. But relatable doesn’t always mean interesting, even if the moments of joy don’t hide the vein of sadness and disappointment that runs through Here.

The same goes for the idea of ​​shooting everything—stretching back into prehistory and straight up through modern times—from the same fixed point and using the same wide angle. In terms of technical craftsmanship, it is a daring experiment, but one perhaps less focused on a dynamic narrative than an art installation. Narrowing the frame limits the narrative, no matter how many times a Significant Life Moment is pushed up close to the lens for emphasis.

Reunited with his Forrest Gump scriptwriter Erik Roth and stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wrightdirector Robert Zemeckis takes its visual cues from its source material, Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic novel of the same name, expanded from a six-page comic published in the late ’80s.

The interdisciplinary artist pushed the boundaries of the comic book format by sticking to the exact same spot in each panel. Framed through the living room of a house built in 1902, his story spans millennia but focuses primarily on the 20s and 2000s. Most of these panels contain one or more smaller boxes that show the same space at different, non-chronological points in time.

By replicating the graphic novel’s approach three-dimensionally, Zemecki’s film becomes like a living diorama with insets that provide windows into the past and future. In terms of craftsmanship, it’s fascinating, even beautiful, for a while. Until it isn’t.

For years now, Zemeckis has been fixated on technology and its visual capabilities, to the point where he neglects the basics of story and character development. The vignettes here often return to the same families at different points in their lives, but rarely settle long enough to sustain narrative momentum or give the characters much depth.

In addition to the self-imposed rigidity of the visual scheme, Here will draw attention – probably in a divisive way – to another technical element that is even more of a distraction. The director uses a generative AI tool from VFX studio Metaphysic to age Hanks and Wright as Richard and Margaret, the characters whose arc, traced from high school to old age, dominates the film. Using stock images of the actors, the program spits out digital makeup that can be replaced on the actors as they perform.

It is more advanced and convincing than the de-aging in Martin Scorsese The Irishman five years ago, allowing for greater elasticity and facial expression—though the actors’ bodies aren’t always a perfect match, especially with Hanks in his teens. But there’s also something inherently creepy about the process, especially at a time when many of us worry that screen acting is heading down an increasingly dehumanizing digital path.

The film begins with the house under construction. This introduces the concept of squares depicting different elements as they meet, with furniture from different periods and the first glimpses of people representing different threads that will develop throughout, some more substantially than others. The opening scenes also plant the central idea in Roth and Zemecki’s script about houses as containers for memory, both lived experience and history.

The frame then jumps far back in time to when the area was a primeval swamp, filled with dinosaurs – until that landscape is razed in a fiery mass extinction event, first forming into rock and gradually into a verdant clearing bursting with flora and (CG ) fauna. A pair of young Native Americans (Joel Oulette and Dannie McCallum) share a kiss there, before another time jump reveals enslaved people building a colonial mansion.

We get fragments of life in the house during different periods: Pauline (Michelle Dockery) is a worried wife and mother in the early 20th century, afraid that her husband John’s (Gwilym Lee) obsession with flying will end in tragedy. Leo (David Fynn) and Stella (Ophelia Lovibond) occupy the house for two decades starting in the mid-1920s. Unhindered by children, they are a fun, boisterous pair of quasi-bohemians who get lucky with Leo’s invention of the recliner. More of their levity would have been welcome in a film often weighed down by its seriousness.

The least developed part covers a black family, parents Devon (Nicholas Pinnock) and Helen Harris (Nikki Amuka-Bird) and their teenage son Justin (Cache Vanderpuye), who bought the house in 2015, when the asking price of $1 million is considered “a steal .”

Their presence shows how neighborhoods are developing and becoming more inclusive. But there’s a nagging sense that the Harris family’s functioning is largely representational, especially when their most defining scene shows Devon and Helen sitting Justin down for a serious talk about the rules he must follow to stay safe if he’s stopped by a police when he was driving. . Their scenes also touch on the terrifying first wave of the covid-19 pandemic through the fate of their longtime Latina housekeeper (Anya Marco-Harris).

But the bulk of the story is about Richard’s family, starting with his parents, Al (Paul Bettany) and Rose (Kelly Reilly), who bought the house in 1945. Al is fresh out of the army and suffers from what appears to be undiagnosed PTSD, which drives him to drink. A child of the Depression, he dwells on money worries, worried that his sales job won’t cover the bills.

The first born of their four children, Richard (played by younger actors until Hanks steps in), brings home his high school sweetheart, Margaret, to meet the family. When she reveals her intention to first attend college and then law school, Al asks, “What’s wrong with being a housewife?” He is even more blunt when Richard, an avid painter, reveals that he wants a career as a graphic artist: “Don’t be an idiot. Get a job where you wear a suit.”

Richard and Margaret marry at the age of 18, after she becomes pregnant. In a heavy-handed nod to sons who sadly follow their fathers’ ways, Richard packs up his paints and canvases. He takes a job selling insurance to support his family, although they continue to live with his parents. Margaret is never comfortable in a house that doesn’t feel like hers, which creates boring problems in the marriage. But Richard has also inherited his father’s financial fears, which prevents them from taking risks in a place of their own.

I wish I could say I became emotionally invested in the changes this family goes through, but everything feels lifted from the most routine playbook of aging, declining health, death, divorce and, most insistently, dreams deferred, sometimes to taken up by the next generation. At Margaret’s surprise 50th birthday party, Wright gets stuck with a melancholy speech about all she had hoped to achieve at that age. It feels like a pale shadow of Patricia Arquette’s analogue – and far more economically articulate – scene i Childhood.

Of the many moments when characters step right up to the camera to say something important, the most embarrassing may be Richard announcing his duty and noting “a moment we’ll always remember” while Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Our House” playing on the soundtrack. This feels right out of one Saturday Night Live sketch.

It is possible that people with an abiding fondness for Forrest Gump will be sufficiently enthralled by seeing Hanks and Wright together again that their characters’ outcomes are affecting. But others are likely to remain stubbornly dry-eyed, despite Alan Silvestri’s syrupy appreciation of the sentiment.

For a film that covers such a vast section of American life, Here feels strangely weightless. That’s no fault of the actors, who all deliver solid work with characters that are hardly more than outlines. None quite manages to break free from the film’s preoccupation with visual technique at the expense of heart.

Historical detours go back to colonial times when English loyalist William Franklin (Daniel Betts), comfortably parked in a horse-drawn carriage, grumbles to his wife about the radical politics of his father Benjamin (Keith Bartlett). (The less said about the clip of Richard and his younger brother at a costume party as dueling Benjamin Franklins, the better.) There are brief Revolutionary War scenes. And there is a sketchy depiction of the original couple’s life before settlement, as they raise their own families and suffer their own losses.

But it is characteristic of an episodic script that finds no opportunity to work its themes too banal, no clichéd line of dialogue too smooth, that even the Indian thread is tied up in a neat bow. It happens when members of the archaeological society stop by and ask to poke around the garden, suspecting that the house may have been built on an important site. Lo and behold…

Only at the end does DP Don Burgess’s camera move from its fixed point in the living room and venture outside the house to take in the tidy suburbia that surrounds it. But an obviously fake CG hummingbird is the final reminder that almost everything is about Here is synthetic.