BEFORE: Tom Hanks carries over from "Music by John Williams". Initially this was going to be Ke Huy Quan carring over, and he was interviewed for the John Williams doc, but I changed the plan, I'll see him in a couple days though, just dropping two films into the mix to fill up August. Hopefully filling another two slots will make it easier to close the September gap, and not impossible.
Here's what happened, I started watching "The Electric State" and something just wasn't connecting for me, or I wasn't connecting with the film. When this happens, it could mean that there's something wrong with my chain, even on a sub-conscious level. (Or, you know, maybe the movie just plain sucks.). But seeing Millie Bobby Brown made me think about another movie she's in that I also want to see, that film didn't connect to "Music by John Williams", but with just a tiny bit of effort, I found one that did. So I'll give "The Electric State" another shot in a couple of days, and this way if it truly does suck at least I'll only have to endure one more hour of it.
Hey, it may not be the best plan but it's the best I can do on short notice.
THE PLOT: A generational story about families and the special place they inhabit, sharing in love, loss, laughter and life.
AFTER: I kind of figured that my first fiction film after watching 49 documentaries in a row would be really special, or perhaps I would be so relieved to get back in that groove that even a terrible film might seem kind of good, but I'm afraid that's not the case. For whatever reason "The Electric State" just didn't cut it. "Here" is probably an average film at best, but the non-doc effect made it at least tolerable, or slightly above that.
I don't really have much to compare it to, because there's never really been a film like this before, told over the span of hundreds, even thousands of years, but with only one camera angle, so whatever the director said was happening on THAT spot in 1776, in 1945, in 100,000 B.C., that's what we get to witness. I'd say the stories are told from the P.O.V. of the house, only some of the storylines are set before the house was built - so if anything, it's told from the P.O.V. of a plot of land, which contains a house's living room in the last century or so. We see the house get built, but that's not a constant, the house kind of comes and goes, sometimes it's not even there, and of course the people and furnishing change back and forth over the decades.
Well, it's interesting to see how many different people owned this house over time, who bought it and who sold it, and why did they sell it then, and why did the next owner buy it, that's a novel idea for at least a few minutes. Beyond that, it's annoying that we the audience have to piece together the timeline from the bits and pieces that we're shown, I kind of got a framework and then found I had to add to it or take away from it as more details about the house's inhabitants were revealed. If you do want to cheat, you can just go to the film's Wiki page and they've broken down the plot in order, so you can get a better grasp not just about what happened, but what happened when.
However, this means that each character's life is reduced to a series of beats, all of the important stuff like birthdays, weddings, funerals, moving furniture in, break-ups and make-ups and then each set of people packs up and moves out for either good reasons or bad reasons. The intent was probably to appear as if there's no rhyme or reason for excessive time-jumping to this degree, but that seems just a bit naive, because why would the director want to show us a day in the life of someone when nothing particularly interesting happened on that day? But then this line of thinking leads me to conclude that putting the narrative thread of someone's key moments in such an order is incredibly manipulative, or at least contrived. The writer or director can control exactly how exciting each character's life was, by showing us more exciting things about that person, or less things overall.
Basically, the dinosaurs died, and we think we know why, but then once things cooled down they became much TOO cool, so Ice Age. Then animals evolved over millions of years to become proto-humans (is this still a controversial subject? I notice that there are no Neanderthals or Cro-Magnons in the narrative, they kind of skip a bit and go straight to what we now call Native Americans. Benjamin Franklin's son has a big house situated where what will someday be considered "across the street", so there are bits set during the Revolutionary War and the years soon after. Then THE HOUSE is built in the early 1900's and so our patience pays off, the story can finally move inside to cover more, umm, private moments.
This is based on a comic book - sorry, graphic novel - with a similar structure, the illustrator, Robert McGuire, has said that breaking up the timeline and showing us moments (or tiny panels on the page) from the different timelines forces the reader to deal with the "now", rather than thinking about each character's past or future. His inspiration came from taking the same family photo in the same location, each Christmas. So these moments are really all meant to be like photos, little snapshots of the things going on in each character's life on those particular days.
However, with the movie, although we still get a sense of "now", literally hundreds of "nows", our brain also naturally wants to assemble them into some linear history that we can deal with - at that point we're no longer focused on the now, we're dealing with a whole timeline, we can't help it. Like when you buy a house, don't you want to know what the deal was with the people that lived there before? Don't you wonder if somebody, umm, you know, DIED there? And then good luck trying not to think about other people getting it on in what you know consider YOUR bedroom. OK, so it's not as bad as sleeping in a cheap motel room, but still...
From the poster, one might infer that this is a movie about Tom Hanks and Robin Wright's characters, and OK, part of it is, but what about the other couples that lived in the house over the years? If you paid for a movie ticket just to see the central couple of "Forrest Gump" re-united in a new movie, prepare for some disappointment, because that's just one of five or six relationships explored here, so how could the film possibly give us an in-depth exploration of any one of them when it just jumps around in time (but not space) so damn much? Well, it just can't.
Besides, who's to say they're going to stay together as a couple for the whole picture? There's trouble in Richard and Margaret's paradise when SHE doesn't want to live in HIS parents' house, then HE tries to earn enough money to put a down payment on another house, but then he loses his job, so that's off the table. She offers to pick up more hours, but then his male chauvinist instincts kick in because HE has to be the breadwinner, and then they apparently argue about this for months (years?) but eventually he draws up some beautiful plans to build her dream house somewhere, only that never really materializes either, and eventually HIS parents move down to Florida and they get the house, only she doesn't want it. Well, simple solution, just sell the house and buy a different one, right? Wrong, because, you know, in THIS economy? Forget it! They'd have to pay capital gains tax, hire a real estate lawyer, get a real estate agent (or maybe two, one to sell the old house and another to sell them a new one), there's closing costs, filing fees, dealing with the bank to get a new mortgage, well, as you might guess it never happens. Finally she...well, no spoilers here.
Some of the later incidents felt pretty forced, like having a somewhat minor character die from COVID, or showing the African-American family have "the talk" with their kids about what to do if they get stopped by a white cop for "driving while black". These are what you might call "topical references", but then I guess the entire film is really filled with them, from watching The Beatles on Ed Sullivan to watching "CHiPS" on TV or working out to a Jane Fonda VHS tape.
I will say that this film depicts the only break-up I've ever seen on film where there were no raised voices, no name-calling, no over-dramatic packing and slamming of the door. Come on, this MUST be a fantasy film. You don't stay married for that long and just end things with a shrug, as if to say, "Well, I guess this is happening..." Not relatable, not to me, anyway. So I guess the larger question here is, what are YOU going to see in this film? Are you going to be reminded of family Thanksgivings and Christmases in the house you grew up in, whatever decade you had the good or bad fortune to grow up in? Will this remind you of the joys of home ownership, when you had that small starter home and you were struggling to make ends meet, but you and your spouse had each other, so you found a way to get by?
Or will you be reminded that everything must come to an end at some point, your parents will at some point get old, get sick and/or die, and then maybe that clock starts ticking on YOU. Every relationship, every life, every era is only temporary, and we're all here for an abrupt time, not necessarily a good time? That in the history of the earth, if all time were a calendar, ending in now, all of human history would only take up like the last few seconds on December 31? Our entire species is here because of some aberration, some fluke like the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs? If not for that, would dinos still be walking on the earth, or would some bird-like creatures have gained sentience and ruled the planet? Plus, we're nothing more than an invasive species as far as our planet is concerned, and it can't wait until our climate change kills us all or we use up all our resources and it can wipe the slate clean again? And will that happen before our solar system ends up being sucked in to the giant black hole at the center of our galaxy?
Really, you can have all the feels here, the good ones and the bad ones. It's up to you. Anyway it's a grand experiment that may not to be to everyone's liking - I've got no specific problem with the format, but now that it's done, please let's not do this kind of thing ever again.
Directed by Robert Zemeckis (director of "Pinocchio" (2022) & "The WItches" (2020))
Also starring Robin Wright (last seen in "Tom Hanks: The Nomad"), Paul Bettany (last seen in "The Secret Life of Bees"), Kelly Reilly (last seen in "A Haunting in Venice"), Lauren McQueen, Harry Marcus (last seen in "Breathe"), Zsa Zsa Zemeckis, Michelle Dockery (last seen in "The Gentlemen"), Gwilym Lee (last seen in "Bohemian Rhapsody"), Delilah O'Riordan, David Fynn (last heard in "Trolls Band Together"), Ophilia Lovibond (last seen in "Man Up"), Nicholas Pinnock, Nikki Amuka-Bird (last seen in "Knock at the Cabin"), Cache Vanderpuye, Anya Marco Harris, Tony Way (last seen in "Edge of Tomorrow"), Jemima Rooper (last seen in "What If"), Joel Oulette, Dannie McCallum, Keith Bartlett, Daniel Betts (last seen in "Carrington"), Leslie Zemeckis (last seen in "Welcome to Marwen"), Alfie Todd, Mohammed George, Denise Faye (last seen in "Burlesque"), Jenna Boyd, David Charles (last seen in "Into the Storm"), Lilly Aspell (last seen in "Retribution"), Jonathan Aris (last seen in "Radioactive"), Louis Suc, Eloise Webb (last seen in "Cinderella" (2015)), Angus Wright (last seen in "Pinocchio" (2022)), Martin Bassindale (last seen in "Holmes & Watson"), Mitchell Mullen (last seen in "Marlowe"), Chris Rogers (last seen in "Dumbo" (2019)), Ellis Grunsell, Teddy Russell, Finn Guegan, Callum Macreadie, Grace Lyra, Jemima Macintyre, Billie Gadsdon (last seen in "Cruella"), Beau Gadsdon (last seen in "The Girl in the Spider's Web"), Diego Scott, Logan Challis, Albie Salter, Albie Mander, Eloise Ferreira, Eliza Daley, Elodie Crapper, Faith Delaney, Makenzie Carmichael,
with archive footage of Ed Sullivan (last seen in "Luther: Never Too Much"), The Beatles, Jane Fonda (last seen in "Martha") ??
RATING: 5 out of 10 cities on the Pennsylvania Turnpike
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