Set in the same spot – from prehistory onwards – Zemeckis’s sentimental drama is an odd combination of cosmic ambition and domestic intimacy

Robert Zemeckis’s sentimental family heartwarmer, adapted by him and co-screenwriter Eric Roth from the graphic novel of the same name by Richard McGuire, is the movie equivalent of a book club choice; the star is a family home, the “here” of the title. Or rather: it’s the living room in a Philadelphia house where so much generational drama plays out. Here is an odd combination of cosmic ambition and hyper-local domestic intimacy, clearly influenced at some level by Noël Coward’s play and movie This Happy Breed, about scenes in the life of a London family in the same house. The dreamy quirkiness keeps you watching and the folksy warmth of performances from Tom Hanks and Robin Wright encourage you to cut it some slack.

The film switches back and forth between eras, with scene-transitions managed with split-screens and inset-panels (a nod to its graphic-novel origins), using the same fixed camera position until the very end. It is sited in the specific “here” in prehistoric times, the American revolution, and when it is occupied by Native Americans (scenes imagined with weirdly childlike placidity). By the turn of the 20th century, it becomes a house, opposite the colonial mansion of William Franklin, pro-Brit son of Benjamin Franklin.