In Hollywood, most movies tell stories. But not”Here.”

Adapted from a conceptual graphic novel by Richard McGuire in which the perspective is the same on every page – the living room of a century-old American house – while windows within each frame reveal actions from different years, if not entirely separate eras, “Here” is about an idea.

Have you ever sat in a place – perhaps a hotel room, a park bench or a remote clearing – and wondered what happened there before? How many people have kissed in that exact spot? Or fought, or fell in love? And what does it say about human experience, that people can be connected through shared actions, and places can hold both memories and secrets?

There are deep thoughts to be found in such rabbit holes, and a film version of “Here” points in about the right direction, only to be distracted by a handful of much shallower threads — namely, the disappointingly generic lives of four families living in the same space at different timings. Reunited with “Forrest Gump” screenwriter Eric Roth and the film’s stars, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, director Robert Zemeckis clumsily replicates the fixed camera, while treating “Here” as an elaborate visual effects experiment.

For Zemeckis, the question isn’t how many existential truths he can squeeze into (or out of) a traditional New England living room, but whether he can get away with manipulating his actors’ on-screen ages over more than half a century. Technically, it’s now possible, although the results look anything but natural, adding another spacer to the already confusing array of events.

From “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” to “The Polar Express,” Zemecki’s superpower has always been his pioneering spirit, while his kryptonite is his penchant for undeserved sentimentality. “Here” fits that pattern to a tee, as the helmer devotes his energy to bringing forth the kind of “digital makeup” that Martin Scorsese used to rejuvenate the cast of “The Irishman,” while draining the project of just what he embarked on. celebrate: life.

“Here” opens with fleeting images of the home where it all happens, glimpsed through a series of neatly framed rectangles, before taking us back more than 65 million years to a moment when dinosaurs identified this clearing as a decent place to lay their eggs. Then comes an asteroid, or maybe it’s a volcanic eruption, followed by a time-lapse ice cream that swells and thaws in seconds.

It’s hard not to be reminded of “The Tree of Life” at this moment: Terrence Malick pondered how lives that feel so important to those who experience them can seem insignificant in the context of creation, dinosaurs, and the vast enormity of time. McGuire attempted something comparably radical in his book, expanding the comic form in the process: Instead of telling a sequential story, he collapsed different time periods into a single scene, allowing total strangers to echo each other’s thoughts and actions within a shared space.

Most “Here” viewers won’t have been exposed to McGuire’s graphic novel, and even those who were will find Zemeckis and Roth using a different approach. Here, it’s less about finding unexpected connections than creating clever transitions, as they try to adapt the arcs from multiple generations. While their goal is simple—to help us make sense of an intricately nonlinear assortment of scenes—the strategy of overlapping frames tends to blur the lines between the various families involved.

John and Pauline Harter (played by Gwilym Lee and Michelle Dockery) are the first couple to occupy the house, which is shown built in 1907. Pauline spends most of her time fretting over her pilot husband, fearing that the reckless aviator might crash . Without giving away the fate of this early 20th century family, it should be said that worry serves no purpose in “Here.” In fact, it can be ironically punished, as if to show that obsessing over the future is the surest way to miss the present.

That attitude extends to Hank’s troubled character, Richard, who gives up a painting career to support his family. Little Richie is not yet born when his father Al (Paul Bettany) and three-months-pregnant mother Rose (Kelly Reilly) agree to buy the two-story house for $3,400 in 1945. It will not change hands again for another 60 years. , making this family and their three children the people we see the most, making the African-Americans who buy it from them and the native tribe that lived there long ago feel more like ideas than characters—the dramatic equivalent of a confession of the land of the indigenous people.

When Hanks first appears, digitally de-aged to look like he did in his “Bosom Buddies” days, it adds some focus to what can feel like an interminable PowerPoint presentation. When he introduces his girlfriend Margaret (Wright) a few scenes later, their movie star status is a clue that we should be paying attention – not to the horrific face-replacement technology, which looks more like hi-def sims than the actors. ‘ younger me, but to these two characters.

As with Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood,” presenting a longitudinal look at so many milestones in an American family (radically reimagined in the case of “Here”) invites us to consider the universality of these experiences. Still, “Here” lacks the kind of specificity that can elevate such scenes beyond mere cliché, putting the onus on composer Alan Silvestri (another “Forrest Gump” vet) to deliver the emotion. While it’s true that a lot of life happens in living rooms, Roth hijacks events that should happen elsewhere to stage a birth, a death, a wedding and three sex scenes in the same space where Christmas and Thanksgiving are celebrated.

Zemeckis gives everything a slightly corny, Currier and Ives-esque feel (especially in several colonial-era vignettes, when Ben Franklin is included), as if he’s competing with vintage Saturday Evening Post covers to capture a typical American family. But the location in which he has chosen to place his static camera – at a slight angle, the couch facing the screen – suggests a much more ubiquitous visual reference: that of the classic sitcom.

The blocking constantly reinforces that model, and since Zemeckis doesn’t cut or go in for close-ups, he forces his actors to approach the lens when he wants us to see their faces. After ninety-four minutes, the director finally chooses to free his camera and spin around to observe a key moment between two characters. Had Zemeckis built “Here” as a museum installation instead of a movie, the fixed POV probably would have made sense. But we’ve come to be moved, and for that to work, the camera should too.