Tom Hanks, Robin Wright and Robert Zemeckis reunite

It’s quintessentially American, straight out of Norman Rockwell, focusing a multi-generational survey around the living room, with scenes around the Christmas tree or dining table reinforcing the ideal theme of home and family, fully expanded to accommodate the ever-expanding family in Thanksgiving Day. But relevant doesn’t always mean interesting, even if the joyous moments don’t hide the thread of sadness and disappointment that runs throughout here.

The same applies to the idea of ​​photographing everything from the same fixed point and using the same wide angle – going back to prehistory, all the way to the present day. It’s a bold experiment in terms of technical craftsmanship, but it’s perhaps less suited to dynamic storytelling than an art installation. Zooming out limits the narrative, no matter how many times important life moments are pushed closer to the camera for emphasis.

reunite with him Forrest Gump Written by Eric Roth and starring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, director Robert Zemeckis took visual cues from Richard Maguire (Richard McGuire) 2014 graphic novel of the same name, which is adapted from a six-page comic published in the late 1980s.

The interdisciplinary artist pushes the boundaries of the comic book format by insisting on the exact same location in every panel. His story is set in the living room of a house built in 1902 and spans thousands of years but focuses primarily on the 20th and 21st centuries. Most of these panels contain one or more smaller panels that show the same space at different, non-chronological points in time.

By replicating graphic novels in three dimensions, Zemeckis’s film becomes like a living diorama, its illustrations providing a window into the past and future. Purely from a craftsmanship standpoint, it’s fascinating, even beautiful, for a while. Until it no longer is.

Zemeckis has been so focused on technology and its visual capabilities for years that he’s lost sight of the fundamentals of story and character development. The vignettes here often return to the same family at different points in their lives, but rarely stick around long enough to sustain narrative momentum or give the characters enough depth.

Beyond the self-imposed rigidity of the visual scheme, here May draw attention to another, more distracting, technical element in a divisive way. The director used the generative artificial intelligence tools of visual effects studio Metaphysics to cast Hanks and Wright as Richard and Margaret, two characters whose storylines stretch from high school to old age and dominate the film. . The program uses archival images of actors to generate digital makeup that can be swapped onto the actor’s face during a performance.

More advanced and convincing than Martin Scorsese’s “De-Aging” irish Five years ago, greater elasticity and facial expressions were allowed – even if the actors’ bodies didn’t always match up perfectly, especially with Hanks in his teenage years. But there’s also something inherently creepy about the process, especially at a time when many of us worry that screen acting is heading down an increasingly dehumanizing digital path.

The movie starts with a house being built. This introduces the idea of ​​panes, depicting various elements as they come together, as well as furniture from different periods, and a first look at people representing different threads, which will be elaborated on throughout the text, some of which are more detailed than Other elements are more substantial. The opening scene also embeds a central idea in Roth and Zemeckis’ script: that houses are containers of memory, both life experiences and history.

The scene then jumps to when the area was a pristine swamp, teeming with dinosaurs—until that land was leveled in a violent mass extinction event, first forming rocks and then gradually turning into a verdant clearing filled with overgrown of flora and fauna. A pair of young Native Americans (Joel Ouellette and Danny McCallum) kiss there, and then another time jump occurs, revealing that enslaved people were building a colonial mansion.

We see slices of life in the house from different periods: Pauline (Michelle Dockery) is an anxious wife and mother in the early 20th century, concerned about her husband John’s (Gwilynn Lee) influence on aviation. Obsession can end in tragedy. Leo (David Fearn) and Stella (Ophelia Lovibond) have lived in the house for twenty years, starting in the mid-1920s. Unencumbered by children, they were a fun, lively pair of quasi-bohemians who were lucky enough to get the recliner that Leo invented. Their more levity would have been welcome in a film that’s often weighed down by seriousness.

The least developed families include a black family, parents Devin (Nicholas Pinnock) and Helen Harris (Nikki Amuka-Bird) and their teenage son Justin (Kash Vanderpuye) purchased the house in 2015, with the asking price of $1 million “a steal.”

Their presence demonstrates how communities can grow and become more inclusive. But there’s a lingering feeling that the Harris family’s features are largely representational, especially when their most fleshed-out scene shows Devin and Helen sitting Justin down to have a serious discussion about what it would be like if he was caught while driving There are rules he must follow to ensure safety when stopped by police. Their scenes also touch on the horrific first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic through the fate of a long-time Latino housekeeper (Anya Marco Harris).

But much of the story focuses on Richard’s family, starting with his parents Al (Paul Bettany) and Rose (Kelly Reilly), who bought the house in 1945 . As a child of the Great Depression, he was always worried about money, worried that his job as a salesman wouldn’t pay the bills.

The eldest of their four children, Richard (played by a young actor before Hanks stepped in), brings his high school sweetheart Margaret home to meet the family. When Al reveals she plans to go to college first and then law school, she asks, “What’s wrong with being a housewife?” When Richard, an avid painter, reveals he wants to become a graphic artist, he gets even more excited. Bluntly: “Don’t be stupid. Get a job wearing a suit.

Richard and Margaret married when they were 18, while Margaret was pregnant. Richard packed up his paints and canvases to pay homage to the sons who had sadly followed their father’s path. He found a job selling insurance to support his family, although they still lived with his parents. Margaret would never feel comfortable in a house that didn’t feel like she belonged, creating festering problems in the marriage. But Richard also inherited his father’s financial worries, which prevented them from venturing out on their own.

I wish I could say I was emotionally invested in the changes this family was going through, but it all felt detached from the most common signs of aging, declining health, death, divorce, and, most insistently, deferred dreams that sometimes get cast down. generation. At Margaret’s surprise 50th birthday party, Wright broke into a somber speech about all the things she hoped to achieve by that age. It feels like a pale shadow of a similar – and more economically expressed – scene from Patricia Arquette boyhood.

Of the many moments where characters step in front of the camera and say important things, the most awkward may be when Richard points out “a moment we will always remember” while setting up the mission, while Crosby, Steele, Nash and Young ‘s Our House plays the soundtrack. This feeling comes directly from saturday night live sketch.

People who may have lasting hobbies Forrest Gump Seeing Hanks and Wright reunited with the consequences of their characters’ endings will make them thoroughly riveted. But others may still be stubbornly clinging to a dry eye, despite Alan Silvestri’s syrupy score smoothing over the mood.

For a film that covers such a broad swath of American life, here It felt strangely weightless. It’s not the actors’ fault, they all played their characters very solidly, with little more than outlines. No one can completely escape the film’s focus on visual technology at the expense of the soul.

In a historical detour back to colonial times, British royalist William Franklin (Daniel Bates) conveniently stops in a carriage to complain to his wife about the radical politics of his father, Benjamin (Keith Bartlett). (Less is better about the footage of Richard and his brother dueling Benjamin Franklin at a masquerade ball.) There are a few brief scenes from the Revolutionary War in the film. There are also sketchy descriptions of the Aboriginal couple’s pre-settlement lives, as they raised their family and endured their own losses.

But that’s characteristic of the episodic screenplay, there’s no opportunity to expound on its themes too clichely, no lines of dialogue too cliche, and even the Native American threads are tied into a neat bow. This happened when a member of the Archaeological Society passed by and asked to have a look around the garden, suspecting that the house might have been built on an important site. You see…

Only towards the end does DP Don Burgess’ camera move from its fixed point in the living room, venturing out of the house to capture the tidy suburbia that surrounds it. But an obviously fake CG hummingbird finally reminds us that almost everything about here It’s synthetic.