A great deal can be observed from staying exactly where we are. Those of us who have a favourite chair fixed in a set place in our houses have a very familiar view. If that chair is next to a window and allows a view outside, fixed objects (trees, houses, lamps, garden furniture, lines on the road) don’t change.
My view is through a small window overlooking an accommodation block which is on the other side of my street. I can see the end of one building, the front of a couple more, a space of green, and a number of lights, which are lit after dark. The top half of my view is of sky. But even before seeing the new Tom Hanks movie, “Here” (MGM), showing now at the Montrose Playhouse, I knew deep down that every time I look through that window at that tiny part of Montrose, what I can observe is completely different. No two occasions sitting in that same chair concentrating on that static view provide exactly the same sensory experience. Becoming a watcher in this way is satisfying and deeply spiritual.
Imagine now that I stand up from my chair and go to the door at the other side of the room. From that position (looking back into the room) I can see the window and the chair from which I just arose in front of the window, plus all the other (rather minimalist) furnishings. I set up a camera in the doorway and start to film. But what is clever about my camera is that it has been there all along. Not just from the time that the person I bought my house from lived there, but from time of the two people that he bought it from, the person they bought it from, and in fact all the way back until the very first person to live in that house put a chair in that window and started to look outside. The camera doesn’t move but each owner of the house changes the carpets, curtains, sofa, tv, phone and all the rest of the soft furnishings. They do this to conform with the fashion of the time and to decorate to their own taste. Now imagine further back. Before my house was built along the Angus coastline there was countryside with forest and trees. That forest was cleared in order to build my house. But as time goes backwards the camera has somehow stayed in exactly the same place, so that I can now see the pre-house environment. Now we have, Adam’s-house-in-Montrose style, the basic premise of “Here”, which is itself based on a graphic novel. The question is does this work as a 1H 44 minute movie?
Given that the timeline for the movie starts before the American Revolutionary War, it would not have worked to show, say, a scene from every year since then. That would produce far too many characters and cause confusion all round. But what does work is to center the story on one family. Thus we have Tom Hanks and Robin Wright who play Richard and Margaret, a middle class suburban couple, plus other actors playing their parents and various family members. We go backward and forward to different phases of the life of this one family, but common to every shot is that single angle from that single camera in that single fixed place in that room. There are a number of thanksgiving dinners for instance, and evenings where the man comes back from work, puts his keys and wallet on the table and looks at the mail all the while listening while his wife tells him what has happened that day. We see births, weddings, funerals, separation, death.
One could take a movie with this sort of set up in several different ways. Richard Yates would have skewered this outwardly comfortable life in one of his novels (say “Revolutionary Road”, which became a 2008 movie with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet). Or alternatively Netflix would have turned it into a psychological horror (say “Intrusion” from 2021). But while “Here” is neither of these, its effect on me was to render a certain type of nostalgic American suburbia strangely flat and decidedly unattractive. It collapses into gendered stereotype. And one problem in the film is that having briefly introduced a contemporary Black family who have recently moved out, and hinted strongly at a sinister turn that the neighbourhood has taken, we are left to guess the rest. This is an odd decision. The plot is actually developing into a scene about a return to the empty house by the elderly Hanks/Wright characters because it is now back on the market. The new family becomes a cameo.
Fans of Tom Hanks will not likely be disappointed by “Here.” He has to play his character over perhaps 60 years, and it is quite strange seeing him as a young man again, gradually ageing until the final scene. He convincingly changes his posture as well as the speed and confidence of his dialogue as he ages. We see the Hanks of different decades and can recall movies from each phase of his long career in film.
Towards the end of the movie, a number of themes emerged: of time vanishing as we get older “I blinked and I’m 50”, of regrets “I put things off and I don’t want to do that anymore”, of the colossal waste of time that is obsessive worrying. Ultimately the film plays with time. Time is not linear, we can go back and forward, windows opening in the memories of our lives, just like the windows that open in different frames in the movie to move us neatly between characters and generations. Because of this structure, overall I found it easy to concentrate, relax and enjoy the film as it is rather than as it could have been.
Adam Poole
19 January 2025
