by Ali Mozaffari
Worth: $14.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Paul Bettany, Kelly Reilly, David Fynn, Ophelia Lovibond
Intro:
Robert Zemeckis proves that he still remains a playful filmmaker who dares to experiment with the art form within mainstream Hollywood.
Here is the latest film from veteran Hollywood filmmaker Robert Zemeckis, reuniting the team that gave us Forrest Gump thirty years ago! (writer Eric Roth, Tom Hanks, Robin Wright and even Alan Silvestri all came back for this film).
The film is shaped around a clever stylistic choice: to narrate centuries of life on earth, especially human life, through one specific house, one single fixed frame, and frames within the frame. While the film manifests its idea from the first ‘frames’, it takes a while for the style to work and for the story to make sense. The film chooses its main frame as a sort of ‘master frame’ or the point of view from which the audience observe moments passing by through the lives of the occupants of this house, and before them, those who roamed the land upon which the house would be built.
While the film focuses mainly on the life of three generations of a middle-class American family, it tries to connect to the previous and future owners of the house. It takes the former as far back as it can, to early settlers, native Americans and way back to the time of dinosaurs, and even ‘the creation’ for a few minutes.
While the narrative seems to move forward in time at first, it sometimes goes back either by changing the whole setting in the frame or showing a frame surrounding a specific part of the master frame as if focusing on a detail (which is sometimes an object changing over time), other times, an event happening in the same house but at a different time, or as a way to move characters in the same timeline and scene, showing the passage of time. By use of such effects, the film manages to tell its story in two or three timelines simultaneously, occasionally to chilling effect.
But what is the film trying to do by use of this playful style, you may ask? To connect the occupants of this house and beyond to emphasise the similarities in the human condition across centuries. Is it successful? For the most part, yes! For some modern audiences, certain aspects of the film might be too sentimental, or some might find the film’s portrayal of history and characters too simplistic or polished (especially actors’ looks, that are de-aged digitally but more successfully than say The Irishman, however the production design could have been less polished to give the place a more ‘lived-in’ and less ‘theatrical’ feel).
Nonetheless, Robert Zemeckis proves that he still remains a playful filmmaker who dares to experiment with the art form within mainstream Hollywood.
The script purposefully focuses on familiar – if not stereotypical – characters and simple subplots and then alternates between major life and also trivial events, to allow the style to work and give them equal weight and importance in the lives of the characters. Zemeckis and his team’s true achievement lies in the meticulous mise-en-scene and the creative editing that binds all these people and their lives to one place: ‘Here’, within this frame and in front of our eyes.
We mentioned ‘frame within a frame’ as the main editing device, but the style also relies on match-cuts, dissolves, morphs and hidden cuts to playfully tie characters and events across time to emphasise the legacy and history of this place. The film doesn’t push this potential to its limits (and if it did, it would have been a more singular and memorable formalistic experience), and instead the sentimental aspects often overshadow the more formal parallels, which create a subtler, yet deeper meaning. But the film succeeds in creating motifs through repeating actions, figures and behaviours and sometimes even focuses on them by literally ‘framing’ them.
The film’s style and overall form might bring to mind the works of the stylish Swedish master Roy Andersson in his famous ‘human condition’ trilogy: A number of fixed frames working as moving tableaus, but where Andersson uses his dark absurdist humour to hint on the pain and misery of being human, Zemeckis offers his trademark optimism and sentimentality. Also, in Andersson’s films, the camera’s vantage point is not always at the same place whereas Zemeckis almost never moves it to suggest a unity and similarity in the story of life, as suggested before.
Here can also be seen as a film about cinema: It frames ‘portions’ of life across ‘time’: it expands time, compresses it, moves back and forth in time, and when the plot reaches the end, the film moves its vantage point to exit that place and time. The end. Speaking of which, be sure to stay for the credits for a nod to Forrest Gump.
