Plenty of movies have magic wands, spells, and artifacts; their heroes quest for or stumble upon or escape to Rivendell, Narnia, and Camelot.
For Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), a 12-year-old orphan living in a Parisian train station circa 1930, escape means sneaking into the cinema with his new friend Isabelle (Chloe Moretz) to watch the antics of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd, and the only magic necessary is the transportive power of cinema itself.
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Hugo 3D Directed by Martin Scorsese. |
That Hugo’s father (Jude Law), glimpsed in flashbacks, accorded the motion picture a singular measure of awe – “He said it was like seeing his own dreams in the middle of the day!” – only cements the movies’ special status in Hugo’s mind (in parallel to a certain Martin Scorsese, growing up decades ago in Little Italy, NYC).
Continuing his late uncle’s work of maintaining the clocks and machines throughout the station in order to evade detection by the vindictive Insp. Gustav (Sacha Baron Cohen), Hugo also marshals his hereditary knack for watchmaking to repair a mechanical automaton left behind by his father, believing it holds a message.
But before Hugo can fix the automaton, his father’s notebook of blueprints is confiscated by Isabelle’s adoptive father (Ben Kingsley), a cantankerous toy shop proprietor in the station who accuses Hugo of stealing.
In order to fix the automaton, Hugo must complete its mechanism; to do that, he needs the notebook; and to regain the notebook, he has to outsmart or outlast the toy-maker while evading the station inspector.
Even without considering the extra dimensions of Martin Scorsese’s personal stake in it, Hugo is many things: a story about growing up (but just a little), about finding one’s place in a grander scheme, and about treasuring or at least remembering and recognizing the past. It is a mystery, though the puzzle elements are not the sort that tend to fare well over repeated viewings.
It is also a booster shot for the flagging fortunes of 3D cinema; not since Avatar has a (mostly) live-action film made such painstakingly organic use of depth. Scorsese expertly showcases the technology exploring the labyrinthine Gare Montparnasse – but the question remains whether the story or atmosphere would suffer in just two dimensions.
The star-studded cast and exhaustive art direction are precisely what one expects from a Scorsese picture, but it needs to be said that Butterfield is nothing short of a revelation in the title role, to the extent that the accompanying performance from Moretz seems cloying and exaggerated by comparison.
This being Scorsese’s first children’s picture, as well as his first foray into 3D, things are rounded out with an offbeat supporting cast, including a pair of what Shakespeare could only have called dog-crossed lovers and the wooing of a florist (Emily Mortimer) by Cohen’s Insp. Gustav, who can’t quite figure out his responsibilities as comic relief.
Somewhere in the third act, Hugo shifts gears and becomes a full-blown love letter to cinema and its creative progenitors, chief among them Georges Méliès, whose effects-filled 1902 feature A Trip to the Moon serves as a recurrent motif – shorthand for the boundless dream-magic of the movies.
Hugo shares movies with Isabelle; Isabelle shares books with Hugo, via the train-station bookstore of Monsieur Labisse (Christopher Lee). While this exchange neatly mirrors the real interplay between storytelling in different formats, it seems funny that a great director’s paean to his chosen medium should be an adaptation of a prize-winning book.
It is more ironic still that a film made in loving tribute to hand-cranked cameras, individually tinted frames, and the silent era should be shot and presented in stereoscopic digital 3D.
Hugo’s contrivances are forgivable, such is its sincerity. Sentimentality has its own drawbacks and this is a film that embraces them knowing its heart is on its sleeve. However, the two-hour running time and inconsistency of tone – ranging between adult sincerity and juvenile cliché – may prove inimical to the tykes and tweens making up its nominal target audience.
With technology driving cinema forward into digital recording, high definition, 3D and more, we don’t even know about yet, it is well worth a look back; one of the most magical moments in Hugo is the instant you notice the soldiers in old war footage are actually marching closer toward you.