Everyone moves into an apartment or house and at some point wonders who lived there before them, and what happened on the very spot they are standing - that is what this film is about. From the vantage of one camera angle we witness history through the eyes of different people in different eras - layers of life and death, happiness and sadness, joy and pain in one spot.
Time flows quickly over millions of years in the first seconds of the film, but slows with the introduction of a pre-contact Native American couple. The first colonial building appears a few hundred feet away in the 1760s, and is based on William Franklin's Proprietary House (Governor's mansion) in New Jersey. There are flashes of other eras that take place in front of this house over time - the capitulation of the British in 1783 - a fireworks display in the 1840s, a picnic in the 1890s... But when a house is built across the street in 1900, the camera becomes imbedded in its living room.
The bulk of the film then jots back and forth over the next 120 years. Smaller stories about a pioneering aviator and his suffragette wife who live in the house from c. 1900 to 1920; a Bohemian couple that occupy the home in the late 1930s-early 1940s who invent the La-Z-Boy (which is complete fiction as the chair was invented in 1929 in Michigan); and an affluent black family who briefly live in the house from c. 2016 to 2023. We never see who lives in the house in the 1920s-early 30s.
The majority of the film focusses on three generations of one family who lived in the house from c. 1946 to 2016. They are the most relatable of all the storylines, but also the least interesting. Although it may have lacked a riveting story arc, I never found the film dull due in part to the gimmick of anti-aging AI that make Tom Hanks and Robin Wright age from an almost believable 17 to 77 years of age.
It wasn't a perfect film, some of the green screen acting came across a bit stilted. The costuming was generally excellent, although the mid-thigh mini skirt wedding dress was too early for 1964, shutters on the 1760s house were incorrect, and there were several questionable set decorating issues, from a 'coffee table' in the 1910s to an overstuffed sectional sofa in the 1960s...
Despite these issues - it's a great experiment in the time travel genre, typical of a Robert Zemeckis film.
