“I’ve often noticed that we are not able to look at what we have in front of us, unless it is inside a frame.”
The statement by Abbas Kiarostami, Iranian grand master of cinema, couldn’t more appropriately describe Home, the new film from director Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future I, II, III (1985-1990), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Forrest Gump (1994) uniting Forrest Gump’s co-writer Eli Roth with its stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright.
Here has been described as an “original film” about multiple families and the place they inhabit.
The story takes us through generations and humanity in its purest form as they live, love, laugh, and die.
It’s about the ups and downs of life laced with emotional tugging.
The camera never moves; it remains focussed on one long shot with people moving within the frame.
It looks like a throwback to films made in 1914 by D.W. Griffith, the American father of the motion picture. Griffith had his actors move within his one long shot toward or away from the camera.
Then considered outrageously experimental, “You can’t do that,” his employers at Biograph insisted.
“People pay to see the whole actor, not half of them, not only a face. It’s unnatural.” Yet Griffith made Biograph buckets of money.
Whether it’s Zemeckis’ personal conceit or his tribute to the past, in colour, not black and white, the technique is imitative.
People familiar with live theatre will feel like they’re watching a play.
A block of space is a character showing us what happens from the age of the dinosaurs and the asteroid impact 65 million years ago to the present. We see the world afire, warming, the ice age, pleasant woodland inhabited by Native Americans, the colonial days, turn of the century, the 1920s, ’30s, and subsequent decades.
A house, built in colonial days, is also a character and one of the most interesting.
It’s set across from William Franklin’s home, the illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin.
We see time passing through a bay window and by interior production design (furniture and decor) within, as Americans call it, the living room.
Time is the film’s third character as we experience families’ lives through the ages, concentration centred mostly on the Young family: returned WWII serviceman and father Al (Paul Bettany, actually younger than Tom Hanks), wife Rose (Kelly Reilly), son Richard (Tom Hanks), and his wife Margaret (Robin Wright). Tom Hanks is always worth watching.
Similar in structure to Griffith’s 1916 epic Intolerance, we are transported somewhat randomly from the Cretaceous Period to 1940, to 2020s pandemic, back to 1950, 1970, and even further back or forward in time
Sufficient audio and visual cues indicate an era.
The Everly Brothers sing Let It Be Me in the ’50s.
Its reprise happens when Lyndon B. Johnson is president, “Listen, dear, it’s our song.”
The late ’50s are captured when Al Young films Richard’s and Margaret’s wedding using a Kodak Brownie Single Lens Standard 8mm camera and floodlight bar.
Max Steiner’s 1959 Theme from a Summer Place wafts in the living room air.
One character invents the Relaxi-Boy chair in the 1920s. Wait until you see how it develops and what it becomes.
If you remember what Tom Hanks and Robin Wright looked like in the 1980s, CGI helps the de-aging process.
It’s mostly convincing, although faces can sometimes look stiff and puppet-like.
Little was spent by the distributor on publicity, but your money spent will be rewarded.
