Film Review: Hugo

It was always just going to be a matter of time before director Martin Scorsese, the walking, fast-talking film encyclopedia, made a film about a filmmaker. He dipped his toe in the water with the Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator back in 2004, but in his latest film, Hugo, an adaptation of Brain Selznick's award-winning book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, he goes all out, rehabilitating one of the pioneers of the seventh art, Georges Mélies, and exhilarating the audience in the process.

The first filmmakers, the Lumiere brothers, emphasized cinema's potential to capture daily life exactly as it takes place, whereas Mélies, who evolved from magician to director, wanted to inspire the audience with flights of fancy made real. Even those viewers today who have never seen a silent film will recognize the shot from his Trip to the Moon, in which a rocket ship crashes straight into the eye of the Man in the Moon.

Scorsese, better known for using the Lumiere brothers' brand of objective realism, fully embraces Mélies and his kind of magic in Hugo, which is also a love letter to the era of silent films and features many clips from films that date to the early years of the cinema, at the turn of the 20th century.

With action set in a snow-swept interwar Paris whose blues and yellows have been amplified to suit the fanciful mood of the picture, the film shimmers with fantasy, calling to mind the work done by Baz Luhrmann to recreate the City of Light in Moulin Rouge. Scorsese, as Spielberg did last year in The Adventures of Tintin, here takes full advantage of the digital format's ability to liberate the camera, since the content isn't always real. In the very first scene, the camera descends from the heavens above Paris, swoops down through falling snowflakes, making its way onto the platform and swerving between trains and passengers at Montparnasse train station, arrives at the concourse and rises up toward the clock, behind which we can make out the figure of young Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield).

The 13-year-old Hugo has been living between the walls of the station since the untimely death of his father, a watchmaker, a few months earlier; he stays alive by stealing scraps of food from the dining carts inside the station and swipes clock parts from a toy stand to use in an "automaton," a kind of robot he inherited from his father.

The man behind the counter at the toy stand is Mélies (Ben Kingsley), whose fame all but evaporated after the Great War and who is now producing mechanical toys that keep children's dreams alive. An encounter between he and Hugo leads to an eventual friendship between Hugo and Mélies' goddaughter, Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz), a precocious girl whose love of books has her using big words and falling in love with characters ranging from Heathcliff  to David Copperfield.

The sets and the background characters don't always look particularly realistic, but whether this was done deliberately or is a consequence of the as-yet-imperfect 3-D technology, the almost dreamlike images are exactly in line with the films of Mélies himself. Unfortunately, the film's dialogue comes across as rather forced on occasion, while a nutty performance by Sacha Baron Cohen as the station commissioner verges on the farcical. His actions, including a stubborn commitment to send stray children to the orphanage, don't allow us any room for pathos, which the film desperately needs toward the end.

A more general problem is the characterization of adults as somehow conspiring against children, before having a sudden change of heart to reveal they have been acting out because they were scared to believe their dreams could be realized.

Hugo is a kind of time machine that takes the viewer back to the days of black and white, when it was so clear there was something magical about going to the movies, and is a work of which Georges Mélies would have been very proud. The clips from films by Harold Lloyd, D.W. Griffith and Buster Keaton contain moments that far surpass Scorsese's film in terms of wonder and excitement, but the importance of making Mélies accessible to a new generation of viewers can't be understated and is one of the central reasons for recommending this enchanting film.

André Crous can be reached at
acrous@praguepost.com