Here (2024)

Here...But Not Really There

or

"Time Sure Does Fly, Doesn't It?" ("And Then I Blink...")

I kept thinking of Robert De Niro in The Deer Hunter while watching Here, the latest film by director Robert Zemeckis.

 

"One shot." "One shot."

 

Which is what Here is. Based on a graphic novel* (by Richard McGuire, which is done the same way), the film eliminates the one major creative decision for a director—"where do I put the camera?"—and takes it, literally, out of the picture. Zemeckis, as a director, is a weird cat. Where a lot of directors will look for thematic material and then build the technical aspects around it, Mr. Z seems to think of the technical challenge first and then find the story to fit it. He was ground-breaking in making mo-cap animation films and as the Uncanny Valley started to get flooded with product so that nobody could see it any more, he started to trust the CGI with drama. It can be done. But, as amazing as Zemeckis' films can look, they sometimes have the heart of a demonstration disc. Inspiration but not aspiration.

So, here's Here. And, technologically, it is pretty amazing, but for reasons that have nothing to do with story-line (except in some nicely worked-out places) or the fact that it re-teams Tom Hanks and Robin Wright nostalgically from Forrest Gump. They are basically irrelevant other than box-office draw (frankly, I was more intrigued to see Kelly Reilly—from "Yellowstone" and the Downey Jr. "Sherlock" movies—and Michelle Dockery—from "Downton Abbey"—in it. It's not a movie where you can judge performances, scattered as they are in this movie's timeline.

And the incidences feel like snap-shots—or worse, like "Saturday Night Live" skits—they pop up, do a bit of business and generally exit on a laugh or a dramatic hit ("And...scene"). God forbid that they should interrupt one of those slices-of-life in mid-chaos and have it resolve later in the story. That would have felt random, instead of calcified and calculated as this movie too-often feels like.

It starts out with its gambit efficiently enough—that one angle—whether it's in a house on that particular parcel of real estate or in its origins as primordial ooze when the boxes start fading in, initially with subtle borders around them until we get the knack of it and then those borders start fading away and they begin to make transitions so we see the neighborhood go from dinosaur stomping ground to hellish landscape to ice age (only one of two times when the camera actually moves) to Native American habitat to the neighborhood of William Franklin (Benjamin's ever-loyal-to-the-king non-rebellious son) to the story-heavy 20th century.

The Franklins' eventual neighbors are The Harters (he's excited that an "aerodrome" will be built nearby and intends to fly—something his wife is dead-set against); there's the bohemian Beekmans, she's a free-spirit and he's an inventor, perfecting a chair he calls the "Relaxo-boy"; post WWII, the non-surnamed folks we'll spend most of the time with (let's call them "The Gumps") move in, sail through the 50's and television, raise Tom Hanks, who gets his girlfriend Robin Wright pregnant, they get married and move in with the folks and eventually age out of the house; then we get the Harris', the only minority couple—besides the Native Americans—that reside there. We get nudged a lot about how things change—the Harris' give their son "The Talk"—and not—frailty and death are inevitable, as apparently is influenza.

For the most part, these folks are chess-pieces that get moved around depending where the boxes show up and those boxes highlight the transitions between entertainment systems, gas-lights to electric, rugs versus hardwood (versus verdant forest), couches to sectionals. Art changes, but the view rarely does. Dramatically, the film underwhelms except in some key places. But, it's not a waste of time...or space. Not at all.

We are used to being manipulated in movies by mise-en-scene and blocking. Directors let us see what they want us to see and use blocking to change the focus of our attention. This gives us the illusion that we're peeping through a letter-boxed slot-view a 360° world-view (we're not, of course; it's an illusion). Here subverts that. We are given one angle to look at—the world may change within it, but it's basically that one section of cinema real-estate, like we're looking at the Closed Circuit Camera of Eternity.

That's where McGuire's boxes come in. Yes, blocking will direct the eye, but it's those moving boxes and their shifting perspectives through time (but not space) that directs your attention, whether it's what's on the television screen, or the silhouette of the car (or buggy) going by the window. Transitions flash in the wink of an electrical storm or a camera flash. Things shift, warp, grow their hair out and stoop but only for a moment of time. If only to have The Beatles on Ed Sullivan accompany the wedding shot (see below).

And—as with McGuire's work—that's the point it's making. Life seems long. But, in the scope of things, it's transitory, gone in the blink of an eye. And that little plot of space we inhabit will still be there, long after the seas rise, the epidemics cull us, idiots atomize us, and we're just dust. Like George Carlin said "Earth Day?! The Earth will be FINE! WE'RE screwed!" Enjoy the details, the movie seems to tell us. We're just passing through.

A couple of shots—little clever instances I liked. The one below, which is the only time we see the rest of the main floor courtesy of a moved bureau.

And this one haunts (and pays a little respect to the McGuire work): while Paul Bettany's "Dad" sleeps on the couch, a box appears to show an earlier version of his long-since-passed wife (Reilly) and she says the first words of McGuire's graphic novel: "Hmm. Now why did I come in here again?" That raised goose-bumps.

It's an interesting experiment for a movie that somebody might come up with a dramatic reason to exploit. But, the point's been made. Like the guy who invents the La-Z-Boy you have to ask yourself—what's it good for?

 

* McGuire's work is so seminal and so tied to the film's strategy—and expanded to different platforms—that the Zemeckis film is almost unnecessary. It started out in 1989 as a 6 page story in Raw Volume 2 #1:

The original's time-frame is from 500,957,406,073 BC to 2033 AD

In 1991, the story was adapted into a student film by Timothy Masick and Bill Trainor, students at RIT's Department of Film and Video.

 

In 2014, McGuire expanded "Here" into a 304-page graphic novel with vector art and watercolors and extending the timeline from 3,000,500,000 B.C. to A.D. 22,175: 

That would be a herculean jump enough, but the Ebook addition of "Here" allowed you to scroll between pages with animated gifs inserted. Which is mind-blowing enough, but at the 2020 Venice Film Festival, a VR version of it was presented.

 See what I mean about the 2024 movie being "unnecessary"—it feels like, artistically and technologically, we've already moved beyond it.

A Haunting in Venice

A Haunting We Will Go/A Haunting We Will Go/Hi-Ho-Confuse Poirot/A-Haunting We Will Go

or

"Lighten Up, Pal! You Might Have Fun!"
 

It is 1947. "World's greatest detective" Hercule Poirot (Kenneth Branagh), he of fusty ways (oh god, they haul out the "egg joke" again!) and the elaborate mustache—that looks like superimposed Aston Martin/Bentley logos—is in retirement. In Venice. "A gorgeous relic sinking into the sea" compares mystery novelist Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), who has skipped the long line of desperate potential clients waiting outside his door to tempt Poirot with a case which just might revivify her career after three critically-panned books. 

 

Poirot will have none of it. A veteran of the first World War (as was shown in the previous film, Death on the Nile), he has lived long enough to see that its reputation as "the war to end all wars" has proved false and, having seen too much of death, has foregone his profession to ease the strain on his little grey cells. But, Oliver is persistent, and so he joins her on Hallowe'en night to the palazzo of opera star Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly) to witness a festive party for local Venician children, and, for an adult after-party, a seance performed by the medium Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh) to try to quell the spirits haunting the Drake place, one of whom might be Rowena's daughter Alicia, who died "under mysterious circumstances" years before.

"Under mysterious circumstances" may be overstating, as the girl drowned in a city that is nothing but waterfront property—sort of like being surprised when there's an explosion at a munitions factory ("Non-smoking? Who knew?"). I'm just saying that the Venice polizia usually don't ask "cause of death?" as they fish another tourist out of the canal. That aside, there is some question as to whether Alicia's death was a suicide or an accident or...was it murder?

Poirot, he does not care. He's there to expose the medium using his powers of observation and his absolute disbelief in the supernatural ("scary stories make life less scary"), suspecting that some grift will ensue from the proceedings. His convictions are only solidified when Alicia's former fiancee Maxime Gerard (
Kyle Allen) arrives after a mysterious invitation is sent his way so many months after the tragedy. Also in attendance is the family's doctor Leslie Ferrier and his son Leopold (Jamie Dornan and Jude Hilll, who played father and son in Branagh's Belfast) and the housekeeper Olga Seminoff (Camille Cottin), all of whom figured in the care-taking of the daughter before her death. It all seems very neat and tidy.

The seance is anything but. It's a convincing show, with Reynolds going into a trance, speaking in the dead girl's voice, spinning in place and with messages appearing on a typewriter ("I think of myself more of a secretary than anything" says Reynolds), seemingly written by "the lost girl from beyond." Nature conspires with the supernatural as a violent thunderstorm permeates the whole procedure. But, the mysteries linger on with Poirot nearly killed bobbing for apples (true!), strange voices permeating the house, flashes of the dead girl from beyond, and...a couple of grisly murders most foul.

A Haunting in Venice is based on Dame Agatha Christie's 1969 novel "Hallowe'en Party" and in much the same way that later James Bond movies are based on Ian Fleming novels—that is, not very. Scenarist Michael Green (he's done the scripts for all of Branagh's Poirot films as well as Logan and Blade Runner 2049) has retained some of the names, but murdered Christie's plot and hatched one of his own (mind you, all with the tacit approval of the Christie Estate). Although it ties up all physical loose ends, it ends up with an implicit endorsement of the supernatural (if only in sub-text, but is rather jarring when its chief detective is committed to exposing the charlatan exploiters of the belief, and a couple of glaring motivations amidst a couple of suspects.

Perhaps because he knew the weakness of the script, Branagh the director works overtime establishing an atmosphere that disorients and distracts. His compositions are full of dutch angles and high and low shots, fish-eye lenses, and full of conversations with askance sight-lines. That's not "normal" film-making (and by that I mean "professional" film-making that obeys "all the rules" and creates a comfortable-to-the-eye-and-mind viewing experience). Branagh's choices are Wellesian in their disregard for viewer comfort; discomfiture is actually key to making the film work. By setting audiences "on edge" and making things look "off" you can get away with a lot of chicanery in a burst of style over substance.

That may sound dismissive, but Branagh has typically been a director of verisimilitude—making things look real. Here, he deliberately makes things surreal, claustrophobic and, often, acrophobic (which is a lot of work!), but it breaks a cardinal rule—never call attention to your directing (a rule too often ignored by beginning film-makers.) The result is so showy and over-the-top that one just might forget the story-line for all the sights to see.

In this case, it's a good strategy. The script is a let-down, full of incident and the occasional zinger of a line, but too convenient and incredulous simultaneously to make a well-conceived plot both among the movie's conspirators and behind-the-scenes in the writer's room. Branagh's work and collaboration with cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos (he's done Branagh's last few films...AND Meg 2: The Trench), however, overcompensates to a degree that one feels that one has seen a real show, full of acrobatics and elephants in the room (and one abrasive cockatoo!) to marvel at, even if the little grey cells are not entirely engaged and unconvinced.

It sure looks good, even if it's as insubstantial as a ghost. 

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

Written at the time of the film's release...

Bullet-Time
or
"Forewarned is Fore-armed (and Don't Call Me 'Shirley')"

"'Well, well,' said he, at last. 'It seems a pity, but I have done what I could. I know every move of your game. You can do nothing before Monday. It has been a duel between you and me, Mr. Holmes. You hope to place me in the dock. I tell you that I will never stand in the dock. You hope to beat me. I tell you that you will never beat me. If you are clever enough to bring destruction upon me, rest assured that I shall do as much to you.'

"'You have paid me several compliments, Mr. Moriarty,' said I. 'Let me pay you one in return when I say that if I were assured of the former eventuality I would, in the interests of the public, cheerfully accept the latter.'

"The Final Problem" Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is the inevitable (and one should say quick-on-its-heels) follow-up to Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes, and as an adaptation of Conan Doyle's "The Final Problem," It has as much source-relationship as the later Bond films have to Fleming—the bare-bones structure is there, but it's pumped, plumped, and trumped-up to fulfill the needs of action, humor and modern audience identification.

Really, "The Final Problem" is enough, we don't need the world-conquering machinations of Professor Moriarty (The Napoleon of Crime, the Scourge of London, and Holmes' best match) to make him a worthy adversary. He merely needs to be omnipresent by means of his web of chicanery, rather than an omniscient history-maker. In fact, Conan Doyle's Moriarty would rather his bad work went undetected, as opposed to this movie's version producing a shattering World War. Here, in the words of Robert Downey Jr.'s Holmes, the plot is "so overt, it's covert," involving twins who aren't twins, TB, the Romany, anarchists, darts for various purposes, intricate explosive devices and not-so-intricate shell-firing ones, countries that can't be named ("although they speak French and German"), and the prospect of "war on an industrial scale."

20/20 hindsight always looks like genius when set in the past.

Actually, it's pretty clever how the doom-laden inevitability of "The Final Problem" is translated into the fore-shadowing of the war-torn 20th Century (the screen-writers are the wife-husband team Michele Mulroney and Kieran Mulroney*), and its focus on large artillery and semi-automatic "machine-pistols" has a nice hard edge as opposed to the original film's emphasis on the psuedo-occult. 

But, director Ritchie seems to have lost of his edge somewhat, as the fight-sequences (and there are many) are nicely fore-shadowed with flash-cut Holmsian cognitive pre-functioning, but when the fisticuffs and baritsu moves start flying, the action is hard to follow, even when the action is slowed to a crawl—there is far too much ramp-editing and Matrix-y "bullet-time" FX in the film for no good purpose other than to slow down the practical and digital effects and give us the illusion of "wow, that was close." (Thanks, we assume that fire-fights and shellings are dangerous things). However fast the editor can manipulate images, one still gets the impression of the film being a bit too "fussy" for its own good, delaying information or simply obfuscating it for a later time, giving one the impression that one is seeing a lot of the movie twice. Efficient, it ain't, even if the titular character is supposed to be the height of it.

Also, although the first of Downey's adventurings could be seen as being a nicely nuanced (if scruffy) interpretation of The Great Detective, here the character is allowed to go a little more broad, dressing in comedic drag ("I admit, it's not my best disguise") and another, which is actually taken from The Pink Panther series (mind you, Steve Martin's "Pink Panther" series), the comedy is played up and not necessarily in character, and Holmes is seen to be practically infallible—even his getting seriously hurt is all part of his plan.

Downey, Jr. is great at playing this, even if it's a more absurd version of Holmes, and Jude Law again plays Dr. Watson (now with a severe limp and who is only now about to be married to Mary Morston, again played by Kelly Reilly) and it's one of Law's best performances, quick as Downey and capable of the slowest of "burns." Law's role is expanded somewhat and he makes the most of it. The two are joined (briefly) by Rachel McAdams, reprising her role as "the woman" Irene Adler, but is soon replaced by Noomi Rapace's gypsy princess Simza. Aiding and abetting is Stephen Fry, as Holmes' smarter, drier brother Mycroft (it might actually be considered type-casting), with Jared Harris as the coolest of Moriarty's (Brad Pitt was initially considered for the role), as well as being one of the youngest.

As fun as it is, one can't help but look at it as a step down—the filmmakers are getting further afield of the Holmes characterization, and it's only a matter of time before the Downey, Jr. version is locked into buffoonery and slapstick, and it comes perilously close to teetering off the edge here. As it is, this plot is more reminiscent of the Basil Rathbone films set during WWII—entertaining if anachronistic fluff.

Paget's Strand Magazine illustration of the first of two Holmes-Moriarty encounters.

* Kieran is the brother of Dermot Mulroney, husband of Michele, and you may best remember him from "Seinfeld" as the fellow who gets bent out of shape at a funeral reception when he see George Costanza double-dipping a chip.

Sherlock Holmes (2009)

Written at the time of the film's release...before the "Benedict Cumberbatch" version of a modern-day "Sherlock" (in case you were looking for clues about why I wasn't mentioning it).

"The Lord, The Woman, the Ginger Midget and the Parisian Giant" 
or 
"The Peripatetic Plot of the Madonna's Husband"

I had been looking forward to the new Sherlock Holmes with anticipation and dread. I'm a fan, though hardly a "Baker Street Irregular," and Robert Downey Jr. is always worth watching—even when he's not, able to suck nuance out of even claustrophobic camera set-ups and able to project a fiendish intelligence out of every role. Fans of the Great Victorian Detective, I've liked several incarnations—particularly Jeremy Brett's encyclopedic and eccentric interpretation, and suffered through the attempts to get another Holmes series started. Brett left a long shadow—one that not even a good choice like Rupert Everett could dispel.* And clues in the trailer led one to deduce that they would try and make Holmes more of an action figure than Conan Doyle might have intended—more like a Bourne-again Holmes than the amateur pugilist of the books. 

There are elements of that here, but done cunningly by writers Michael Robert Johnson, Anthony Peckham, and Simon Kinberg; Holmes, ever the synthesizer of information-bits diagnoses his battles first using his observations of his opponents, then carries them off with judicious speed, making note of their potential recovery time, both physical and psychological. Neat touch that, as is a nice summing up of Holmes' misanthropic characteristics—sitting at a restaurant table awaiting Watson (Jude Law,** as good as Law has ever been) and his intended, Mary Morstan (Kelly Reilly),*** Holmes observes every argument, every petty theft, every peculiarity of his fellow diners—without his mind disciplined in pursuit, the vagaries of the world must drive him mad. Both Robert Stephens and Brett maintained that the difficulty in playing Holmes is that there is no center to him—a brain with no heart. Bur even an unbridled intellect must react to the world, and in Downey, jnr. there is quicksilver in those reactions. 

The game that is afoot is one that will challenge Holmes to his core in a battle of facts and logic against magic and the dark forces.**** When we first see Holmes and Watson in action, they disrupt a ritual sacrifice by the fiendish Lord Blackwell (Mark Strong), who is already responsible for three murders before the fourth is disrupted. Sentenced to hang, Blackwell informs Holmes he will rise from the dead to usher in a new destiny for England. Holmes is skeptical, but intrigued, especially after Blackwell is hanged, declared dead (by Watson), then escapes his coffin. At a time in History, when engineering marvels such as London Bridge are being accomplished, it seems more imperative than ever for Holmes to dispel the superstitious. 

Disrupting his concentration is a visit by the one woman who has out-foxed Holmes, Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams, far too contemporary an actress for the part—one expects her to huff and say "whatever..." at any moment), in the story "A Scandal in Bohemia." Adler is an adventuress, to be sure, but she is almost a secret agent here, more in line with the fictional series of stories that been built up around her by Carole Nelson Douglas. 

There is far less drawing-room discussion and far more darting about and cane-dashing than in previous incarnations. The humor is amped up considerably, and the effects of injury down-played, but for all that it's a good representation of Holmes, adrenalized and puffed up as it is. Guy Ritchie shows that he has evolved from mumbling street-thug films to something with more than empty panache. His breathlessly paced opening half of the film stumbles somewhat with an extended fight with a Parisian giant, but manages to regain its footing with some genuinely well-done sequences that manages to clue the audience in to eke out its suspense. There has been some criticism of late that Ritchie doesn't have the depth or focus to pull off a big-budget film, although he's been angling for them for years. "Sherlock Holmes" is his defiant reply. 

And not only are Law and Ritchie showing their best games here—composer Hans Zimmer, long an adherent of the generically grinding over-the-top symphonic score (he supervised all three "Pirates of the Caribbean" scores, which, frankly, are hard to tell apart), his work for "Sherlock Holmes" is folk-song based, with clever rhythms and instrumentation—kudos to orchestrator Kevin Kaska—that keeps the period alive amidst the clutter of the art direction.

Fans of Sherlock Holmes can relax.

* Although I'd like to see Ralph Fiennes, or better, Daniel Day-Lewis, try. 

** Law appeared in the Granada version of Doyle's "The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place."

*** Although why Watson feels the need for Holmes to meet her in the first place is rather odd. She did, after all, hire him in "The Sign of Four."

**** Conan Doyle's stories focused on matters that challenged the societal structures of Victorian England and elaborate plots of thievery, and rarely dealt with the occult, although some of the modern stories—like Young Sherlock Holmes (1985), which also featured an occult presence, as it was produced by Steven Spielberg, not long after Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, have featured Holmes against more supernatural threats. There was always that element to Doyle—such as the monstrous "Hound of the Baskervilles"—but they were usually explained away in bursts of Holmesian fact-checking.

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