Here
Miramax (2024)
This movie is not going to be for everyone. It's the kind of film that I expect most people are either going to love or hate without too much in between. It has been getting destroyed by most of the critics and audience reviews so far. It's a shame to see that, but I'm not surprised.
I loved this movie, but it wasn't until around the halfway point that it started to win me over. If you're patient and stick with it, I think it can win you over too.
Here is based on a 2014 graphic novel of the same name. It takes place at a fixed spot in New Jersey and shifts through time to show what is happening at this exact location over the years. Try to imagine an invisible movie camera that cannot be seen or felt in one particular location filming everything that comes into its field of vision for thousands of years before the footage is collected and turned into a video scrapbook which is presented to you out of order. That's what this movie is. It shifts between the time of the dinosaurs, to the days when Native American tribes still dominated the continent, to the days of the Revolutionary War, to the days of the Spanish Flu, to the 1940's during World War II, and then through the rest of the 20th century and into the 21'st, to the time of the Covid-19 Pandemic, to the present. For most of this time, the fixed location is the living room of a home, but the story goes back to the time before the home was built.
The main story involves the Young family. Al and Rose buy the home when Al is discharged at the end of the second World War. They have three children, the oldest of whom is a son named Richard (Tom Hanks), who is the star of the film and who starts a family of his own.
There's no getting around the fact that this film is very gimmicky. The fixed camera doesn't budge an inch until the credits are about to roll. It continually jumps forwards and backwards in time, with transitions that occur in a way that reminded me a bit of the old picture-in-picture feature that became common in televisions in the 90's. You'll be watching a scene of something taking place in the 1940's, and then a box will appear in which everything inside the box is from the late 1700's, or the 2020's. Each of the stories from separate time periods are linear for the most part, so the time jumps take you to an entirely different era. It's a bit jarring at first, and I probably haven't done the best job in explaining it, but it'll make more sense when you see it.
In addition to this, most of the performances are a bit over-the-top. It's not done to a ridiculous degree, but it reminded me more of the kind of acting you'd see on stage than in a movie. To add to all of this, the filmmakers used an AI called Metaphysic Live to show Tom Hanks and Robin Wright as their younger selves.
This is all a hell of a lot to ask an audience to accept, but if you're able to resist the urge to nit-pick at the structure and allow this film to tell you the story that it has to tell in the way that it wants to tell it, its a powerful experience that reminds the viewer that life is short, time flies, and we're all flawed people who have a lot more in common than we think that we do.
