Features Toast of the Town (1948)
Tale
A story of generations about families and the special place they live in, sharing love, loss, laughter and life.. Based on the comic book "Here" by Richard McGuire. It was first published as a strip in the comic book magazine Raw; in 1989, and was expanded into a 300-page graphic novel in 2014. [from the trailer] Richard: You know, you can spend the rest of the night here if you want. Margaret: I could spend the rest of my life here..
home, then in 1900
This is an epic historical drama set in a single geographic location, probably New Jersey, from prehistoric times to the present day. It quickly touches on dinosaurs and the Ice Age, and then mixes the theme in the pre-European era with a Native American couple (Joel Oulette and Ddannie McCallum), in colonial times with the news of William Franklin (Daniel Betts). on the site of a house built across the street from a colonial house. We meet the various families who lived in the house, including John (Gwilym Lee) and Mrs. Harter (Michelle Dockery), an aspiring airline pilot by 1918.
Sometimes, multiple eras are shown on screen at once in framed segments of the screen
Later, we meet Lee (David Fynn) and Stella Beekman (Ophelia Lovibond), a fictional inventor of the recliner who lived there until 1940. After the war, the main subjects of the story are Al (Paul Bettany) and Rose Young (Kelly Reilly), their son Richard (Tom Hanks), and Tom’s girlfriend and later wife Margaret (Robin Wright). Later, the house is inhabited by the African-American Harris family, Devon (Nicholas Pinnock) and Helen (Nikki Amuka-Bird). Robert Zemeckis uses a single camera position that looks through the living room to an exterior viewing window after the house is built. We see joy, sadness, disappointment, conflict, comfort, nostalgia, and pathos in the various lives lived in that space.
The prehistoric stuff felt tacked on
Contrary to some critics, I thought Robert Zemeckis’s approach worked well enough for a holiday film. There’s no climax, but “Here” watches the unfolding lives with compassion. Not everything in the film was great. The local segments needed more development or skipping. The film could have started with a house built in 1900.
I would have liked to know more about the Harris family
But this was vintage Tom Hanks as Everyman, and Robin Wright was a perfect fit.