by: Riley Glover
Within the wonderful world of comics, time flows differently than how we perceive real life or even the inherently linier strip of film can allow no matter what weird non-liner storytelling tricks you use. In the simplest definition one can give without going into Scott McCloud speak, what can happen within the frame of a comic panel is a moment of time captured in amber that is clarified within the context of other panels and the space between them.
That gives the impression that comics fit the same re-construction of linear reality that a film reel is. That is until you reach something like “Here,” the groundbreaking comic turn graphic novel by artist Richard McGuire meditates on the rhyming nature of time and living in the now by using the space of a living room nonlinearly. While this room could exist now, we see though the power of the comic panel in the same physical space in 1958, 2008, 2037, and 1775 split in their own crystallized windows of time simultaneously.
Through this method, Richard not only shows how all things are always waltzing within the history of everything, but the importance of living and finding meaning within in the now as much as seeing how everything connects back into the now.
How would someone then turn THAT concept custom designed to be read within the world of the comic book, where time can easily be understood to be non-linear though the flatness of a comic, be turned into a moving picture designed to be seen mainly as one beginning to end experience? According to pretty much the entire brain trust responsible for “Forest Gump,” an admirable but bewildering adaptation that almost balloons the original concept to what feels like twice the length and turns it into a surprisingly bitter work of retrospective Boomer art disguised as sentimental Norman Rockwell type nostalgia seemingly blind to its own utterly damming critique of heteronormativity.
To adaptate such a simple to explain yet complex to execute formal gimmick to a high budget feature film, many of the loose ends and dialog from the comic starting from the end of World War II to the modern day has been turned into the story of a couple from the guy’s birth, Tom Hanks’s Richard, before meeting his wife,
Robin Wright’s Margaret, as teenage lovers, only to then spend most of their lives stuck in the house where the entire film has placed its camera to stay as we see a pregnancy just out of high school conforms their lives into the average American Nuclear Family; repressing all their dreams as so to keep the illusion of stability going. That sounds tremendously cynical for a film marketed to be a sentimental drama for the holiday season and it could just be simply an angle of interpretation.
The film spends much of its time exploring as much the joys of raising a child or family life as much as there is a tongue in cheek energy with how history is intertwined within the plot, particularly within the usage of Benjamin Franklin as a recuring plot point. Yet the film argues for much of the run time with the central rod of Richard and Margaret that things aren’t really ok.
Though the film’s attempts to expand on the scope of the original comic, the irreverent pop cultural kaleidoscope of “Forest Gump” comes back through its many references to major political ideas ranging from inflation, suffragettes, race, revolution, and disease among other, many of which weren’t really focused on in the book as to keep with its focus on the passing of time.
The reason why the book likely didn’t do being when you introduce political concepts into a story, you must deal with the consequences, and in Robert Zemeckis’ isolated digital playground with people dancing in computer skin suits, political issues only exist to be used as tools for a broad theme upon way time just keeps on folding in on itself in these spaces where the cycle of life continues with little variation.
And due to such references, it’s difficult to not see the limited room Margaret exists in when she is desperate for a room of one’s own not rhyming with the suffragette we meet in flashes though the windows we’re allowed to peak though or Richard falling into the same traps his father did, getting stuck in the same job and being thrown around in the same ways his father did simply because that’s what a father is expected to do instead of his real dreams because that don’t pay the bills. Time rhymes with itself in a way we confuse it as just circular.
It leads directly into the strangest decision the film does in adaptation the story that I will not spoil here, but in doing so throws away a large part of what the book tries to say about the nature of time as if to say such things are now outside the realm of our comprehension these days. By the time the credits rolled, a nagging feeling of tangible disappointment from my first viewing wondering why such a conclusion so on the nose in relation to the themes of time was chosen turned into serious anger towards the film makers in why they thought a lean toward such schmaltz that walks backwards the character development and themes that much of the film seems to hurling itself towards.
Instead of a devastating criticism of the American dream handed on to us since the end of World War 2 that has dwindled more and more into fantasy, those feelings are then instead turned into a grotesque facsimile of a Norman Rockwell image without the true heart of goodness much of his best works provided.
While I do think this is one of the most distinctive American films released this year, it exists to this critic mostly as this grotesque final statement of a generation that seems to view its own existence as a failure rather than see what a better answer is, only then to leave the next generation to possibly continue the cycle.
Time passes all things eventually, but such thinking shouldn’t lead to the hopeless nihilism that “Here” film adaptation seems to indulge in by its conclusion, mistaking the flawed material reality we created in America that can be changed by anyone caring as the same thing as the regular ways time passes through our fingers and degrades our bodies. A difference that I thought the film was smart enough to avoid, but apparently instead just being something else on a long list of disappointments that I shouldn’t have put such hope into.
