Best Picture Watch: Here, Directed by Robert Zemeckis

Vanity Fair has the exclusive first look at Robert Zemeckis’ new film, Here. It sounds … interesting but potentially challenging. As usual, Zemeckis is fascinated by pushing the boundaries of technology and film:

“If these walls could talk…” That phrase is often said about the sites of well-known historical events, but it also applies to the private places where we spend most of our lives. In his upcoming film Here, director Robert Zemeckis puts a new spin on that idea, exploring what would happen if these walls could see.

Here takes place entirely from one fixed point of view. The camera never budges. It doesn’t zoom and never even turns. What does move—and rather quickly—is time. More than a century of life in one American living room plays out during the brisk 104-minute story. “The single perspective never changes, but everything around it does,” Zemeckis tells Vanity Fair in this exclusive first look. “It’s actually never been done before. There are similar scenes in very early silent movies, before the language of montage was invented. But other than that, yeah, it was a risky venture.”

And continues:

Here is a Forrest Gump reunion of sorts, both in front of and behind the camera. The film, which debuts in theaters November 15th, stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright and was cowritten by Zemeckis and Eric Roth, all of whom collaborated on that earlier Oscar-winner. Little has been shared about Here’s unusual point of view until now. “That’s the excitement of it,” Zemeckis says. “What passes by this view of the universe? I think it’s an interesting way to do a meditation on mortality. It taps into the universal theme that everything passes.”

And:

Although Here’s focal point doesn’t change, the actors do. Hanks plays a baby boomer named Richard, who at certain times in the story is approximately his own age of 67 but also traverses the decades thanks to traditional makeup effects, as well as digital de-aging effects. Hanks ages into his late 80s and also goes backward to when Richard was a very young man in the 1960s—looking just like two-time Oscar winner did on his TV show debut as the baby-faced star of 1980’s Bosom Buddies. Wright joins the story during Richard’s late teenage years as his girlfriend and later wife, Margaret, as the couple raise their own children in the house he grew up in, and also goes from looking decades younger to old age as her lively, more adventurous character pulls her husband through the changing times. “Eric and I wrote our generation,” says Zemeckis, who is now 72.

The photo from the article shows more or less the way the film will look,

Tom Hanks and Robin Wright on a Christmas day in the 1970s, with Kelly Reilly and Paul Bettany as his parents in the background.

COURTESY OF SONY PICTURES

Here is a screen shot of the de-aging (courtesy of SONY PICTURES)

And actual aging (courtesy of SONY PICTURES)

A thing I’m realizing looking at this and reading the story is just how long of a shadow the Baby Boomers have cast on Hollywood and the Oscars and how we’re living now through the last gasp of that. As a Gen-Xer, I’ve always been trailing the Baby Boomers and am also not a Millennial, but by far, the most influence over film since the Greatest Generation of the 1930s and 1940s has been the Boomers, and they’re on their way out now. A new generation is taking their place. So the question then becomes, will anyone other than the Boomers be interested? And that is a question I do not know the answer to. I can say that I’m interested and not just because Robin Wright and Tom Hanks are reunited. I’m curious about the passage of time and technology. I only hope and pray- hope and pray- that there is no politics injected into it. Please spare us that.