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enough, but not too much from NPR podcasts. Okay, thank you for listening. Here's the show. What if you spent eternity in one living room? That's the premise of here, a new drama starring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright as a married couple whose lives unfold in that living room over the course of many decades. I'm Linda Holmes and today we're talking about here on pop culture happy hour from NPR. Joining us today is my co host, Steven Thompson,
Hello, Steven. Hello, Linda. And also with us is our great pal NPR film critic Bob Mandello, hello, Bob. Hello, so great to be here. So Tom Hanks and Robin Wright are reuniting in here 30 years after Forest Gump and they're doing it with the same director, Robert Zemeckis, Zemeckis wrote the screenplay with Eric Roth based on a graphic novel by Richard
McGuire. The hook of the movie is that the camera sits in one spot at the corner of this living room and observes vignettes from the lives of Richard and Margaret played by Hanks and Wright, but it also shows scenes with Richard's parents who live in the house before him. And before that, at different moments in history, we see other people living in the house, a fun loving inventor and his wife, a guy who is obsessed with piloting some of
the earliest airplanes to his wife's chagrin. There are also views from the same perspective from before the house was even built, focused on an indigenous couple and strangely Ben Franklin. We even visit a family living there after Richard and Margaret who deal with the onset of of course, COVID. If it sounds like a lot, it is a lot here is in theaters. Now I want to get into it, Bob. What did you think?
Well, it's ambitious. I feel as if lately we're seeing a lot of aging directors making big statements and this is kind of a good point. Yeah, that's a good point. It's good point. It's big and it's all about the technology. He loves technology. He did so much with polar express and with Hooper and Roger Rabbit and you name it. He's always been playing with us. And even with Forest Gump. Right. That's true. I remember the fuss made over the floating feather in the house. That's true.
And that the insertion of him into a scene with JFK and some other ones. Right. He's playing a lot with it. And initially when I heard it was all going to be from one angle, I thought, oh my God, that's going to be deadly. Just looking from one angle at a room, even if you change the furniture a lot. But he reestablishes the frame in clever ways. It looks a little bit like when you're doing on my laptop, when I decided to show all my photos and I do a sort of a photo.
And it's kind of cascading. Right. And they move around and things like that. It looks a little bit like that for a bit. And initially I thought that was gorgeous. I mean, it was really interesting to watch how he was getting from one thing to the other. I was kind of impressed by the moves. And then after a while, you kind of want that to add up to something. And it kind of doesn't. So that's the problem. I mean, technically, it's a very ambitious piece of filming.
Yeah. I agree with that. Stephen, I was sitting next to you and I felt like the sighing was coming off of you in waves during this movie. I'm sorry about that, Holmesy. I always hate to tip my hand. Oh, I was doing it also. Yeah. So about this movie, you know, we talk sometimes about the distribution model for different films and whether a movie is best seen on the big screen or whether it's best seen on television. Maybe you should watch it on an airplane. Maybe you should consume
it, you know, in different settings. And this movie to me should be released directly to the podcast's flop house. And how did this get made? Yeah. This movie is so to me instantly miss begotten. It is miss begotten from the opening moments. Bob, as you noted, there are some lovely effects and there's some strong technical work. But right off the bat, you're going into CGI dinosaurs and you're just immediately thinking,
oh, we're doing this. You're going to try to top the tree of life in your in your schmaltz y, tree-kley. Oh boy. This movie did not work for me at all. The dialogue in probably especially I would say the first half hour of this film feels like it is of and in a bad school play. There's a bunch of like G Willikers in the dialogue that is like you have got to be kidding
me. I think it gets a little better as it goes along. I think there are a couple of things that cohere into something particularly around the Tom Hanks and Robin Wright performances. This movie does not care about anybody besides them. Even though other people get a lot of screen time, this did not work for me at all. Yeah. When Steven talked about dinosaurs, I just want to be clear. I know that sounds a little bit out of nowhere, but the camera is kind of sitting in the same position and
you're essentially it's like overlays. So we're sitting in the same position, but it's from before the house was even built. So you're seeing old timey before there was a house, but then you're also going back to the dinosaurs and the ice age and there's a little bit of backwards and forwards. I had the same reaction as Steven that I pretty much felt immediately
like the conceit of it was not going to work for me. So I did start trying to identify the things that I did like about it and the things that I admired about it because I had the feeling that it was going to be pretty easy to identify the things I didn't think worked well about it. I do think Robin Wright very economically with a small amount of
screen time makes more of a character than Hank does for most of the movie. I think there's a palpable frustration she has about being as we all are stuck in this house for a long period of time. I did also enjoy these kind of wacky sections with David Finn and Aphelia Lovebibond as this inventor and his wife in the 1920s. They are at least having fun. Well, you originally see her and she's in satin pants and a robe with a brown underneath.
She's dancing around with the vacuum cleaner. Music is playing the house at this time is very colorful. It's very busy because they're kind of wacky people. When I saw that, I thought I thought, I think I would watch this movie. Despite the fact that his invention turns out to be a recliner chair and they spend a long time working up to the fact that he's the inventor of the lazy boy, it becomes a kind of a thing where you know what they're
going to do. The degree to which that was not a spoiler. Yeah. And it's one of those things where you kind of are just waiting for the, you know, it's one of those pieces where at the end they say, and that man's name was Alexander Graham Ballard. That man's name was used as lazy boy. That part I didn't care for, right? But I did like them. Okay. And I agree with Bob that some of those visual transitions are inventive. My biggest problem with it, I think, was the way that it is made up of
a series of such short bits. Right. I started after a while kind of counting in my head
how long these bits are before they shift to something else at different time. The ones that I counted in my head were running, I would say somewhere around 30 to 45 seconds on average, some a bit longer, particularly if they had kind of a monologue, such as the father of the black family giving the talk about dealing with the police, which is kind of the only thing I think they knew to do with a contemporary black family, which I thought
was disappointing. But a lot of them are shorter than that. And they're so short that the entire movie feels like a long montage. And that kept it from kind of building anything dramatic to me. You know what's really interesting about our conversation is that we've not even mentioned yet the thing that I think most people think they're going to go to this movie for, which is that it de-ages Tom Hanks and Robin Wright.
Yes. And Robin Wright. I went back and found some pictures of Tom Hanks when he was actually 18. And he doesn't look like that in this movie, right? I mean, he doesn't look young in that way. He does look young in a different way, which is digital. I'm struck by how little that mattered. You know, they actually do play him with children when he's supposed
to be a child. They didn't de-age him that much. Right. And if they're going to do that, why not just do it the way that you usually do for the teenage scenes and have another actor play him? I couldn't figure out what was supposed to be happening there because then the aging from 18 to like 35 doesn't really feel like it's happening. Doesn't look that different. Right. You look like you're watching Tom Hanks in Bozimbuddies, whether
he's 18 or 35. Right. I think they actually de-age Tom Hanks pretty successfully up to a point. I think it is a better de-aging than some of the other ones I've seen in terms of how weird it looks. But that's because I think they pretty successfully de-age him to like 35 from he's currently in his late 60s. But then you have a guy who looks 35 whose father played by Paul Bettany is turning to him and saying, you're 18 years
old and you kind of are going what? You two are the same age. Yeah. Well, and Paul Bettany is about 15 years younger than Tom Hanks. So there are moments in this where you get Paul Bettany who clearly is younger than Tom Hanks playing his father and it becomes a little bit muddled in that way. Yeah. This is always the hassle with the de-aging thing. It's great. You can make the face look younger. Yeah. But the movements aren't. You know, he's jumping
up around. This is the Irishman problem where you have young Robert De Niro's face on old Robert De Niro's body. Exactly. And getting up from a chair is difficult, right? You know, I'd be interested to have the count of whether Tom Hanks has substantially more screen time than Paul Bettany because they have definitely promoted this as a Tom Hanks movie. That's right. But I am not sure that Tom Hanks has that much more screen time than
Paul Bettany does. Playing his father who is a war veteran, there was part of me that thought there is a family story here about these people. And I think the problem is you keep cutting around to these moments where these moments in history are kind of signified in the most obvious ways possible. It's the 60s, so it's the Beatles. It's the 80s. So you
have somebody doing the Jenga Fonda workout in leg warmers. It's all sort of obvious. And so when I read this stuff from Zamekis and from the Co-Rider aircraft where they were trying to capture this idea that like in one place all these amazing things have happened. And I
get that. What a forest gump was a house. Right. The problem is none of these things are that interesting other than like I said, the inventor and his wife, other than that, it all feels kind of like stuff I've seen before except all in the same house. You know, I mentioned earlier that I'm looking at a lot of aging directors doing big statements.
And I'm thinking about Megalopolis and Francis Ford Coppola who I remember coming out of that and saying to anybody who would listen to me because nobody really wanted to hear about the movie very much that I remember when my grandmother turned 90 and I was about 11 and she had so much that she needed to say about life. And every time we saw her she was saying it and I might not have
been ready to get the information that she wanted to give me, but she had so much to say. I feel like all three of these directors and by that I mean Zamekis and Coppola and Clint Eastwood whose movie, jurd number two, is also coming out at the same time. They have a lot to say about things that they've kind of been talking about in other movies. And they feel like they have to
sum things up in some way. And you sit there and you wonder why do they have to do that? Now in the case of Coppola, there was so much that he had to say that he'd been saving up and he tried to put it all in one movie. In this one, it feels as if, Robert Zamekis wants to synthesize the stuff that he has been saying in a lot of movies about family. He makes it about a place because he doesn't really have anything new to say about the families. And so doing it in this method
makes it seem like it's a new thing. So that would be my take on it. Yeah, I think that's right. I would be more interested, I think, in a documentary about how they made it. Then I was in the movie itself. Yes, I think the little as Bob and I've talked about these inset boxes that they use for
kind of transitions. That's all interesting. But even just stuff like the fact that the camera is working with this very firm, standardized, deep depth of focus and is doing without some of the traditional film language, I'm glad that people can do things that break expectations. And my first thought when I heard about the basics of this film was, yeah, it's not that big of a deal. The sit your camera in the corner of the room. It's theater, right? It's what theater is.
But they do use the filmmaking elements of it, I think, in an interesting way sometimes. But in the end, I think the story is overwhelmed by the tech around the way that it's made. It also feels like it's a little bit of a year for, I don't know, misbegotten passion projects. To me, this movie feels of a piece not only with a megalopolis, Bob, as you said, but the movie if the remember the John Prisinski imaginary friend movie from the beginning of the summer.
And it's like a movie that is so clearly deeply heartfelt while at the same time being so poorly thought through. And also in lieu of a lot of earned sentiment and payoff is dispensing a ton of, to use a very ungenerous word, treacle. This film for me kind of accumulates a certain treacle quality, I think greatly, greatly magnified by Ellen Sylvester's score, which is so over
the top. You have these, these movies that are in many ways their ambition is very admirable, but that ambition isn't tethered to storytelling payoff or any kind of plot. Yeah, I do want to also mention in terms of the storytelling and the plot, we alluded to this, but I really was put off by this kind of surface treatment of this couple that is credited literally as indigenous man and indigenous woman. Like they would also have names
and be people who have a story. It feels obligatory, it feels perfunctory and I was quite put off by that. And we talked a little bit about the fact that there's a black family that moves into the house after Margaret and Richard. And the fact that the big scene that you get with that family is that scene of the father explaining what to do if you get pulled over by the police, I want to stress. That's real, it's not that that's not a real thing or not a real problem. I just would have
liked to see more of that family having a fuller life. They felt added in a way that I didn't seem fully respectful to me to those characters as whole people. It's one of the central problems with this film, with the exception of the Robin Wright character. You don't necessarily have characters so much as characteristics. You know, we talked about this a little bit with the Tom Hanks character, but he just doesn't have much of a character. He's got a couple of quirks that come up again and
again, but otherwise he doesn't really cohere into a full person. And that's doubly true when you have people kind of farther removed from that core for lack of a better word story. So you wind up with people boiled down to very surface characteristics, which in the case of a black family discussing police violence gives you no room to tell the story of who these people are. And so you get to the point where it's like, why did you even put this person in your movie if you didn't care enough
about them to tell the story? Well, you put him in your movie because otherwise you'd be pilloried. Exactly. I think what's frustrating about the movie is it does feel ultimately,
like somebody came in afterwards and said, but what about? And then they added things. And I mean, I have to say one of the more interesting moments for me, and I know this sounds idiotic, is the revelation of what the extinction event was at the very beginning because I just never, in all of the times I've pictured something happening, it has not been a rain of fire from the skies. And I thought, Oh, that's okay. Sure. I'd love to know the science behind that.
It's a way of explaining it. Right. And it was okay. I will say the funniest thing to me that's kind of funny in this awkward way of, you know, I don't think this was supposed to come off quite the way it comes off is the Ben Franklin. Which I just felt like leave it out. You didn't need it. I think the power of this story is potentially in that it's not an exceptional house. It's just a house where amazing things happen because human beings are amazing. Well, and as a matter of fact,
it has more power as a technical achievement than it does as a story. It's almost as if the story doesn't matter. And I don't make that argument lightly. I make it as a as a critic who has to see 300 movies a year and who is relieved when he sees somebody doing something that is at least a little bit outside the norm. And so three cheers for Zamekis trying to broaden the norm a little bit. I agree with that. But he doesn't do it with interesting material. I think you can argue that
that's been true in a lot of the films of his career. And that's a frustration. Well, and I do think Zamekis knows how to find a handle in your brain and just pull it whether or not it's particularly skillfully done. I did cry at the end of this movie because I have aging parents. And so, you know, I reacted, but I felt quite manipulated by that and wasn't crazy about the way it made me feel anyway. For me, not a good movie, but an interesting project is what I would say.
I endorse that. All right. Well, tell us what you think about here. Find us at facebook.com slash pcaj and on letterbox at letterbox.com slash npr pop culture. We'll have a link in our episode description up next. What's making us happy this week? Okay. So does this sound like you? You love npr's podcasts. You wish you could get more of all your favorite shows and you want to support npr's mission to create a more informed public. If all that sounds appealing, then it is
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other npr podcasts too. With npr plus, you get perks like sponsor free listening, bonus episodes, early access, shop discounts, and more for over 20 different npr podcasts like this one. So start supporting what you love and stop hearing promos like this at plus dot npr dot org. Once again, we find ourselves in an unprecedented election. And with all that's happening in the lead up to the big day, a weekly podcast just won't cut it. Get a better grasp of where we stand
as a nation every week day on the npr politics podcast. Here are seasoned reporters dig into the issues that are shaping voters decisions and understand how the latest updates play into the bigger picture. The npr politics podcast. Listen on Spotify. Now, it's time for our favorite segment of this week and every week what's making us happy this week Bob Mandello. What is making you happy this week? You're going to think I've lost my mind. Never. Raking leaves. Oh, I get it.
I am enjoying raking leaves more than I can say. We have a dogwood in the front yard that has recently released all of its leaves. I actually my husband went by and shook them as I was raking. I was ready to kill him, but they are coming down in reds and yellows and greens just from this one tree. And I'm remembering going around in elementary school maybe because I've just seen here, but I'm remembering going around in elementary school and picking up the pretty leaf that I
would take to school to put in the book or on the page or whatever. And I love this. I love the smell of the falling leaves. I love in two weeks, I know I'm going to hate it because I will have done it way too much and I will have to keep on raking leaves. But right now I am enjoying this times 15. It's happened. That's incredibly easy for me to believe. It makes total sense to me. I do not think you're silly at all. I love it. This is a good weekend to rake leaves too.
Focus on that. Bob Mandello loves raking leaves. And that is why we love Bob Mandello. Steven Thompson, what is making you happy this week? Well, anytime a band takes kind of a long break from recording, say 16 years, I don't expect the subsequent album to be among an artist's career highlights, but I absolutely love the new album by the cure. It's called Songs of a Lost World. It is very, very bleak. If the process of raking leaves reminds you of decay and death, perhaps you want to put
the new cure album on your headphones. It is this lavishly produced, very cohesive and coherent collection of songs. Lyrically, it is very dark. It is after all the cure, which is a band known to inject its songs with a little bit of bleakness, but it's also very beautiful. It's here a little bit of the song alone. Peppy, it is not, but it is levied by the beauty of the arrangements in ways that make it feel not oppressive. I had a rare and surprising opportunity to interview
Robert Smith of the cure for morning edition this week, which was just a delightful treat. And I got to check off a bucket list item that I didn't know I had. I asked Robert Smith a question, and he replied, that's a little bleak, isn't it? Which to me is the equivalent of if I were interviewing the Pope, and he said, that's a little Catholic, isn't it? It felt like a true endorsement.
To have Robert Smith think that something I asked him was bleak. Anyway, that songs of a lost world beautiful record first in 16 years by a band that has given me so much of the cure. That is wonderful. We will put in the newsletter, of course, a link to Stevens' interview with Robert Smith. So what is making me happy this week? As we tape this, it is Thursday. We have a big election week next week. There's a lot going on in the world. There's a lot going on in life.
And the main thing that is giving me comfort right now is playing video games on my PlayStation 5. The one that I want to talk about is called lawn mowing simulator. And I was just going to say if Bob is enjoying real leaves, I am enjoying an imaginary lawn where I sit on a lawn mower. Sit on a riding lawn mower and drive it around mowing lawn. And it's very satisfying. And sometimes I'm very efficient and I try to get the job done and earn my money and earn a bonus
for getting it done in a normal period of time, a good period of time. And other times I just ride the riding lawn mower. And sometimes I do like little circles in the riding lawn mower and I try to make pretty patterns in the lawn. And when you tell people that you're playing a game called lawn mowing simulator, they sometimes say, is it a lawn mowing simulator? And I say, yes, absolutely. It is a lawn mowing simulator. And it's giving me a lot of warm fuzzies as I try to
maintain my equilibrium in these tense times. So lawn mowing simulator is what's making me happy this week. If you want links for what we recommended, plus some additional recommendations, sign up for our newsletter at npr.org slash pop culture newsletter. That brings us to the end of our show Bob Mandello, Steven Thompson. Thank you so much for being here. Here. Thanks buddy. Thank you. This episode is produced by Mike Cazif and Havsa Fatema and edited by
Jessica Reedy. Hello, come in, provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to pop culture happy hour from NPR. I'm Linda Holmes and we'll see you all next week. We finally made it election week. It's what this whole never ending election cycle has been building up to and what happens now will dictate the future of the country. Keep up with election
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