Movie Review: Hugo
As I wipe away tears of exhausted joy, the sheer overwhelming beauty of Martin Scorsese’s Hugo is just beginning to take shape as a solid, golden object of art that should come to be a classic film for children and adults in the same pantheon as The Wizard of Oz, The Red Balloon, and E.T. Scorsese has been leading up to the kind of picture that would serve as a personal summation of all of the reverence the director has always displayed for film history – The Aviator is a definitive tribute to Hollywood’s most fabled time, while Shutter Island tips its fedoras to Hitchcock, “old dark house” movies, and Sam Spade capers. Hugo takes us back to the birth of cinema and one of its greatest masters, Georges Méliès, in the fable of an orphan boy living behind the walls of a 1930s Parisian train station.
Based on Brian Selznick’s acclaimed picture-novel, Hugo is a Dickensian flight-of-fancy dripping with saturated color, a swirling score by Howard Shore, and some of the most dynamically immersive camerawork I have ever seen (thanks in no small part to a masterful use of 3D technology to rival James Cameron). How strange that Martin Scorsese would put down his dark materials for a spell to play in a wonderland of fresh steel and chrome in a Paris flush with the possibilities of the Industrial Age; a seemingly ill fit to find a king of New York grit adapting a children’s fantasy until you see the infant joy the director displays with his swooping cameras, montages of classic silent films, or the uncorrupted gaze of neophyte wonder Asa Butterfield as the titular hero.
Hugo watches an old film-reel of better times with his deceased father (Jude Law) happy in creating things together. Young Hugo is a prodigy with a gift for invention, joining his father in trying to bring to life a steel automaton figure retrieved from a ruined museum. Once his father dies in an accident, the homeless urchin is set on bringing the metal man back to life to give him one last message from his dad. Like Victor Hugo’s nineteenth century heroic poor, Hugo lives his days in defiant motion, winding the train station clocks (hiding the fact that his father is no longer there to do so) while evading a series of comical chases from the station gendarme (Sacha Baron Cohen, amazing in a blend of Peter Sellers and John Cleese). He is also befriended by a clever waif (Chloe Grace Moretz) whose father has stolen Hugo’s treasured notebook of inventions.
The man at the wind-up toy counter, embittered and unkind, is the girl’s father (Ben Kingsley). He grudgingly gives Hugo a job when impressed by the boy’s inventiveness, but steals away the notebook that will help him fix the automaton. The children’s discovery of why the old man is miserable is the key to a deluge of cinema worship awash in the second half that will leave true cinephiles weeping behind those darkened 3D glasses. Not since Cinema Paradiso has a movie so thoroughly conveyed the awestruck wonder of what movies can be and the emotional DNA they have instilled in those of us devoted to the art. Scorsese has given our ilk a generous gift that would be soured by a cynical adult reading of this masterwork.
Asa Butterfield in Hugo.
Too thrilling, colorful, universal, personal to be conveyed in mere words (most of the source novel lacks dialogue while the movie has plenty), the film’s visual rapture is proof that there is nothing like the storytelling capable with the magical conjuring of cinema – proper tribute is paid to the Lumière brothers (like their 1895 short film, a train barrels at us until it practically bursts out of the screen), Harold Lloyd’s daring clock stunt in Safety Last (1923) is acted out by Hugo, and the influence of Steven Spielberg lingers over the automaton scenes reminiscent of his A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001).
A masterpiece concerned with film and childhood preservation, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo effortlessly charms on the surface, while warning against the tragedy of losing the art and culture which for 120 years has united us in the shared hum and glow of the miraculous cinema screen.
Gregory Fichter
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