Starring: Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Paul Bettany, Kelly Reilly, Gwilym Lee, Nicholas Pinnock, Michelle Dockery, Ophelia Lovibond, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Cache Vanderpuye
Runtime: 104 mins. Reviewed in Nov 2024
Reviewer: Ann Rennie
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A generational story about families and the special place they inhabit, sharing in love, loss, laughter, and life.
I really enjoyed this movie. It isn’t a blockbuster but there is something gentle in its meditation on mundanity and mortality, the unspectacular, but not unimportant, lives that most of us lead. Perhaps there is touch of regret about what could have been. What remains is the ordinary decency of men and women whose lives are entwined by generational love and loss, joy and sorrow.
The film is based on a 2014 graphic novel by Richard McGuire and much has been made of the pairing of Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, 30 years after their acting together in Forrest Gump. We see them age from 18 to 80 and the use of artificial intelligence/deep fakes to de-age them is interesting. Wright as an 18- year-old appears more like a 30-year-old and both have a smoothness to their faces which is not quite human. But that is being picky and I admire the concept of using one actor ageing across a lifetime rather than the usual convention of different actors for different time frames.
Essentially, this film tells the story of the occupants of a home built in 1900 over the course of a century. The living room is where the action happens and we see the changes in fashion, popular culture and family life over these years. The film centres around the Young family; Al (Bettany) the father, a WWII veteran and unhappy salesman, his wife, Rose (Reilly) the 1950s homemaker, and their three children. Richard, (Hanks) the oldest son, brings home Margaret (Wright) his high school sweetheart. She becomes pregnant at 18 and he does the decent thing and marries her. On the black and white TV Ed Sullivan introduces the Beatles singing All My Lovin’ as they tie the knot. Richard has dreams of being an artist and Margaret dreams of doing law, but the pressures of a young family means that these dreams do not take seed.
The film centres on place – Here – and what happens on that spot over eons. It starts with primeval bubbling, dinosaurs, indigenous hunters, colonial pretensions and finally the building of this solid home in a New England town. The first owners are a well-endowed couple with one child. Mrs Harter (Dockery, almost reprising her Downton Abbey role, except not quite so plummy) is a woman of her time. John Harter (Lee) is a keen aviator and is glad the home is near an airfield. His wife admonishes him for always having his head in the clouds. He dies unceremoniously from the Spanish flu.
Next we have the couple, Lee (Flynn) and Stella (Lovibond) who add some zing to the narrative with their colourful characters and bright and experimental interior. Glenn Miller’s String of Pearls serenade plays in the background as they dance and laugh and he starts to invent the idea of a relaxing chair, which ultimately becomes the La-Z-Boy recliner.
Then we have the Youngs. Al is fairly unemotional but drinks on the quiet and Rosie smooths everything down to keep things nice. The hurriedly married younger couple, Richard and Margaret, move into the family home and over the years this becomes a sore point for Margaret who desperately wants some independence. At her surprise 50th birthday party she wishes she had done more with her 50 years. Later, she moves out, finally finding a sense of self away from the constraints of wifedom.
There are scenes of death and dying in the living room. After the Youngs sell the house, we are brought up to date with a comfortably-off African American family (Pinnock, Amuka-Bird) with a white cleaner and a son (Vanderpuye) who is being given lessons on how to deal adroitly with police officers if they pull him over in his car.
The minutiae of family life is dissected as director Robert Zemeckis uses close-ups as well as panels on the screen to transition from scene to scene. This meant a bit of looking closely as two things were happening at once, however, for me, this was not too jarring, although it might affect some viewers’ enjoyment.
The TV keeps us abreast of world events with the NBC announcement of the Pearl Harbor attack and Dean Martin crooning in his signature way. I enjoyed looking at the set decorations and seeing how the living room seemed to change character itself with the different items of furniture dressing it. I particularly liked the soundtrack, especially hearing ‘Our Home’ by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, ‘Let It Be Me’ by the Everley Brothers and ‘The Monster Mash’, a one-hit wonder by Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett, as well as the always stirring Sousa marching band song.
Songs mark certain times and places in our lives and I thought this was done with great complementarity to the changing set, manners and mores of the living room’s inhabitants. The film closes with Richard saying to Margaret, who now has dementia, that they did the best they could.
We did the best we could. If we can say that at the end of our lives, we should be reasonably happy. This film interrogated the ordinary but crucial familial networks, decisions, opportunities taken or not, that make our lives what they are. Something to be celebrated.
A lovely film in a minor key.
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