| One house over the years. One camera in place to watch the people come and go in their lives. I’m not a fan of the digitally de-aged Tom Hanks and Robin Wright trailer, but what sold me on seeing this was a critic that described it as covering centuries. There is definitely a good idea in that concept, a single space as it has evolved over centuries, over human life. Here is not it. | | 2024
Directed by: Robert Zemeckis
Screenplay by: Eric Roth, Robert Zemeckis, Richard McGuire
Starring: Tom Hanks, Robin Wright
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Technically it does cover centuries, but barely. The opening minute takes us from near the beginning of Earth through to the 21st century. The rest of the movie, with absolutely no focus and an editor who can’t stop hitting the “cut” button, spends most of its time in the recent decades. By far the more interesting things would come from the periods before those of us reading this were born or before our parents were born, but the few scenes with Native Americans, or the revolutionary war, or the turn of the 20th century were very few, very short, and very far between.
Transitions between scenes are done via picture-in-picture and it is neither clever nor advantageous to tell the story this way. It’s gimmicky. For a movie with one specific focus – the location of the camera – there is absolutely no focus on anything else in the movie. There are a whole lot of random time jumps before it starts settling down with uninteresting people.
Apparently Robert Zemeckis thinks it’s more important to tell us that Tom Hanks working as an insurance salesman is soulless, and Robin Wright thinks the house is too small. That central family – with Hanks and his wife Wright, and his war-time parents and politically-active siblings – is most of the movie. And they are not interesting at all. These characters are as paper-thin as you can imagine. Robin Wright’s character is the only sufferable one and she doesn’t have all that much depth either. Hanks spends the entire movie complaining about taxes and mortgage rates, and if we were living in present day, she would have divorced him long ago.
For the first half of the movie, I was trying to look out the window of the house. See how the house across the street, the streets themselves, the landscaping has changed, but we spent so much time in the 1960s through 1990s, that it wasn’t all that interesting. And it also became clear that Zemeckis doesn’t want us looking out the window. Unfortunately the people living in the house are less interesting than watching trees grow. I would rather watch trees grow.
It's weird that all of these famous and well-liked actors signed onto this movie and it’s even weirder with all the creative people behind it that they found the most uninteresting things to focus on.
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