Ryan McNeil
The saddest thing about growing up, is how hardened and apathetic we become. The more time that passes, the more we see – and the more we see, the more we believe we’ve seen it all before. It’s a sad fate for us as adults, when you consider how we begin our lives as children of curiosity and wonder. In those early days, we can fall hard for so very many things, and find endless hours of joy.
This change in attitude affects who we spend our time with, where we choose to wander, and indeed – how we watch our movies. Martin Scorsese understands this hardening that comes with age, and with HUGO, wants to remind us what it was to be young…and how we once fell in love with the wonder of motion pictures.
Our titular hero is Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield). As a boy, his father was tragically killed, leaving him an orphan. But before he died, his father imparted a few valuable things to young Hugo. For starters, he taught him enough about being a clockmaker, that Hugo becomes a pretty good one – good enough to keep all the clocks in a Paris train station running on time. Beyond that, he also left Hugo an Automatron: a robot that seems a few springs and gears away from being fixed. What it will do once it’s fixed is anyone’s guess.
As Hugo tries to avoid detection – especially from the station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) – he comes to the attention of a toy maker whose shop is in the station (Ben Kingsley). He seems very private, and is especially perplexed by the notebook Hugo carries with schematics on the Automatron. He’s so perplexed, that he steals it and destroys it. However, he can’t turn his back on young Hugo…so he offers him a job at his stand building and repairing toys.
As Hugo gets used to being his new role, he finds himself drawn to The Toymaker’s niece Isabelle (Chloe Moretz). She has the spark of Wendy darling and Pipi Longstocking rolled into one, and shares Hugo’s fascination with the world at large. However, she is deeply perplexed by her uncle’s obsession with Hugo’s notebook, and wants to help him reclaim it. Soon, the two young souls find themselves sharing their life passions. She introduces him to the world of literature, many of which she is able to borrow from the station bookstore. He introduces her to the world of cinema, delighting in the antics of Harold Lloyd.
Strangely though, her uncle isn’t fussed about Isabelle going to the movies. The search for the reason will send the two children on a journey of discovering what makes the heart and imagination truly tick.
HUGO is possibly best summed-up as a motion picture faery tale. It draws inspiration from THE WIZARD OF OZ and PETER PAN and overlays them on 20th century Paris. It takes the childhood fascination with those sorts of stories, and uses them like tinker-toys to build its wonderful story. Specifically, it builds a story about being inspired and believing in magic. It’s a story we fall hard for thanks to our protagonist – a kid whose expression makes you want to start sentences with the words “Yes Virginia…”.
The knee-jerk reaction is to call HUGO a Scorsese plea for film preservation, and I certainly cannot dispute that. For years, Scorsese – a man who sees the entire world at 24 frames per second – has been tirelessly working to not only preserve and restore the cinematic treasures of years gone by, but also to educate new generations on these stories and the influence they’ve had. It’s a cinefile-turned-cinema god’s way of giving back. So to helm an entire film about one of one of the early masters might seem like Father Marty stepping up to the pulpit.
However, what those early films contained, and what this film builds upon, is that youthful sense of wonder. It’s not looking to amuse the entire class of second graders the way that Buzz Lightyear can. What it wants to do is inspire those one or two second graders that are fascinated by the extraordinary. The kids who want more than just video games and TiVo. It wants to inspire the next generation of filmmakers and storytellers, and it does so by having one master tell a fairy tale based around another master. It’s not “Martin Scorsese’s Kid Friendly Film”, it’s “Martin Scorsese’s Kid Friendly Film”. He believes that out in the world are kids as in love with movies like he was, and this is his gift to them.
Since the resurgence of 3-D, I’ve been waiting to see what some of the master directors could do with it. Giving Scorsese this shiny new toy is very much an exercise in what’s possible. Few other working directors can move a camera the way that he does, and giving him the extra element to work with is a tool he uses well. The film allows us to swoop, zip, and slide all around the train station. It causes snow to fall before our eyes and steam to swirl in front of our face. It creates some beautiful depth and makes for a cheeky echo to the talk of early audiences’ reaction to the motion picture. I’m not sure if Scorsese will ever make another 3-D film, but if he does, I’ll happily fork over the extra cash.
What HUGO wants us to remember most, and what I loved about it so much, is that there was a time where movies weren’t out to make moviemakers rich. There was a time where the biggest innovators were artists and magicians, and the limits of what was possible were seemingly non-existent. In the film, the toymaker claims that the world grew cynical…far too jaded by the real-life horrors they had witnessed to be amused by his mere trifles anymore. I wonder what he would have thought of the cynical business filmmaking would become, where his trifles would likely be considered “unmarketable”.
At their best, movies are the beautiful hybrid of physics, imagination, and magic…and I’d like to hope that for some out there, that they combine to create new volumes of faery tales.
This is such a lovely review. Very well done 🙂
I so want to see this film. I can imagine it becoming one of my favourites. And I love Asa Butterfield even without actually having seen any of his films. He just seems kind of wondrous.
Glad you liked it! Hopefully it doesn’t take too very long to get out to your neck of the woods.
My God. I am jealous! At least I can go on about Tintin before you folks across the atlantic! Brilliant review – I had no idea what it was about so the fact that it is building on scorsese’s attitude towards preservation is brilliant. The very idea that it is a 3D film about the artistic-skill behind filmmaking will hopefully speak a little bit more deeper to those cashing in on the medium.
Oddly enough, the 3-D seems to be divisive amongst those I know who have seen it. However, I find that it adds a bit more magic to what is supposed to be a tale celebrating the magic of the movies.
I still have to wait another four weeks or so for TINTIN, when does this film drop in The UK?
2nd of December. Not long really. Might be watching an early screening of WAR HORSE on that very night if things pan out… nothing confirmed, but WARHORSE isn’t due until Dec 26th in the UK!
We don’t get WAR HORSE until Christmas Day – and I won’t be able to see it until 12/27 at the soonest thanks to all the Christmas running around we have to do!
I’ll be anxious to read what you think of it after it hits the UK next week.
I said something similar in my review of ‘Hugo’ in that I wished that it was possible to make a pure fantasy movie that doesn’t rely so much on realism (or “realism,” in Hollywood terms). In other words, too much Christian Bale and not enough Adam West.
http://widescreenworld.blogspot.com/2011/11/hugo.html
Tell me something – how do you think this film is going to age?
Lovely review, agree with much of it. To me, Hugo is one of the best movie of the year. It’s like going back to film history class, I remember the first class was about the film pioneers, watching short movies, like the Kiss, The Great Train Robbery and yes Melies’s A Trip to The Moon. Scorsese is able to achieve this while making a magical children’s movie is quite an achievement.
I think Hugo is Scorsese’s most personal film. Growing up with asthma, Scorsese watched movies instead of playing with other kids. He has an encyclopedia knowledge of movie history. I remember watching a documentary he did about movie history, and you can tell by his voice that he’s excited just talking about the movies he saw as a kid, even if they weren’t very good.
Hugo obviously has a different childhood than Scorsese, Hugo watched Harold Lloyd films growing up, Hugo’s father watched Melies. But they all share a sense of awe when they watched movies. I have the same feeling, I remember my jaw dropped when I watched Superman for the first time, or watching Charlie Chaplin’s shorts and laughing when I was a little kid or watching the magic of E.T, these moments stay with me.
Hopefully Hugo can be that film for the kids, because visually it’s wonderful and the 3D effects is superb. It does wander a little in the middle, but it doesn’t hurt the film for me, because Scorsese, like Melies has created a magical world. A world that anyone could dive in for a long time.
Indeed. For me it was the animated features of Walt Disney that drew me in, since as a kid I didn’t see many live action films on a big screen. Geez, what it must have been like to drown in the works of Lloyd and Melies.
Part of me fears that this film isn’t going to do all that well financially, but I do feel that this film has a timelessness to it, and that people (and kids) will continue to discover it as the years pass.
I like Hugo less and less the more I think of it. The message is all well and good, but that lead kid is a charismatic black hole, much of the story is boring, and Scorsese doesn’t seem all that interested in the point of the movie till past the halfway mark. Hardly magical, the kids in the theater were bored to tears, the parents were pulling out their iphones to kill time. This is going over like a lead balloon and I can’t necessarily blame the audience and their disinterest in Georges “unmarketable trifles”.
The craft of the film is nice, often inspired and magical, but as a whole as a children’s film, Scorsese has made his most boring film since New York New York.
Know what’s weird? A lot of people I’ve listened to and read with half a brain’s worth of film-lit seem really put-off by the film’s inclusion of the roots of cinema. Then there seems to be just as many more who love that element to the story.
I count myself with the latter…I actually think it’s what elevates the film beyond “Precocious Kids Run Around a Train Station”
I’m also gonna go out on a limb and guess that you had a wickedly bad screening experience. Any chance that tainted your view on the whole film?
Deference to article author, some fantastic entropy.
Great review. I’ve been in love with movies for a while now, but I didn’t fall in love with this one. Found it very boring. It was also very childish but, at the same time, I couldn’t see any kid enjoying this. It started to pick up when the truth about Papa Georges is discovered, and the visuals are stunning, but it’s too little, too late.