Mark Reviews Movies: HERE TODAY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 6, 2021

Here Today tries so hard and from so many angles to pluck at our heartstrings that it loses most of its potential impact. The movie doesn't start that way, but by the end, our emotions have been tugged in so many ways that it's almost exhausting.

Co-writer/director Billy Crystal stars as Charlie Berns, a successful writer of plays, movies, and television who has been silently dealing with dementia. He has also been barraged by a lot of unspoken grief and guilt over the death of his wife a few decades prior, and then there's the fact that his adult children keep him at a distance, after even more decades of him focusing on his work over his family.

The movie starts as a comedy, and if you're wondering where the punch line to the life of this character is, it doesn't exist. It's not much, but at least Crystal and Alan Zweibel's screenplay (based on the latter's short story "The Prize") don't try to make a joke of any of Charlie's problems.

Instead, the pair spend a lot of time searching for and sometimes finding humor elsewhere. There's Charlie's current gig, working in the writers' room of a late-night comedy show, where all of the other writers are younger than him and he only gets a few jokes on the air. He's kind of a punch-up man for the others, and there's a dispiriting lack of humor from any sketch and all of the workplace comedy within this section of the story. The climax of this subplot is an unfortunately mean-spirited scene that sees Charlie publicly railing against an actor who can't put the emphasis on the right syllable.

The good news, perhaps, is that this screenplay is so busy trying to do so many things that none of the material on the show really matters much. The bad news is that the movie's indecisiveness means it never takes the time to establish or develop any of the characters or relationships that really matter.

Take Charlie's children Rex (Penn Badgley) and Francine (Laura Benanti), who exist in this story to stare at their father with disapproving looks and talk to him in skeptical tones. Neither knows that Charlie has dementia, because he wants to spare them the pain after the death of their mother, so we instantly have some sympathy for Charlie in regards to his familial ties. They think he's just a jerk. He's actually suffering a great deal, and there's an almost whiplash-like effect to the scene where all of that old, lingering animosity just evaporates as soon as the father finally says a few truthful words about what's happening. The build-up to that moment is non-existent.

The same goes for the story's other key relationship, which is between Charlie and Emma Payge (Tiffany Haddish), a complete stranger who meets the writer after stealing her ex-boyfriend's prize to have lunch with Charlie. The two hit it off over jokes and, in a most contrived manner, a trip to the hospital, after Emma is surprised to discover that she has a seafood allergy—after ordering a seafood salad with extra shellfish.

Emma disappears for a significant stretch of time, only to return and become immediately and deeply involved in Charlie's medical issues and family woes. There's some distinct awkwardness in the movie's suggestion that the two—who are a couple generations apart in age, regardless of Charlie's health troubles—might develop romantic feelings for each other. Again, it's not much, but the filmmakers eventually settle on a meaningful friendship. Like much of the material and storylines here, the movie reaches that relationship by way of a lot of shortcuts.

All of this might sound contrived and quite a stretch, and admittedly, most of it is on paper and, as the script forces connections and clean resolutions to all of these relationships and conflicts, in practice. On the other hand, the movie achieves a lot of goodwill from the presence and performances from Crystal, who hasn't lost a beat of his off-handed comedic timing and gives us a melancholy sense of Charlie's declining mental facilities, and Haddish, who comes in like a ball of charming energy and gradually makes us believe that Emma does care for this relative stranger. Whatever reason might actually be for this connection, beyond the fact that the story requires the character to do so, remains a mystery.

We like these two actors and, to an extent, characters, and for a while, that's enough to hold out some hope that Crystal and Zweibel might dig deeper into their bond, some shared sense of grief or pain or compassion, or something more than the fact these two make each other laugh. Those moments never quite arrive, although the payoffs to this relationship (a slow dance in an apartment building courtyard, featuring a fairly classy cameo, and a declaration of purely platonic love) are genuinely touching.

The same, unfortunately, can't be said of much else that Here Today tries to do, which is so much that the movie feels simultaneously too relaxed and too rushed. The relaxed part, simply spending time with these characters, is understandable. The rushed part isn't.

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