Martin Scorsese hardly seems the most obvious choice for a whimsical 3-D children’s movie — based on an illustrated novel by Brian Selznick — about a big-eyed, scruffy-haired young scamp who winds the clocks of a Paris train station, steals gears and mechanical bits from the gruff old toyshop owner, and narrowly avoids capture at the hands of a bumbling station inspector and his Doberman. After seeing Hugo, it becomes clear that perhaps not even Scorsese believes he’s the right director for that particular movie. Luckily for him, and for us, that’s not the movie that he made: Hugo may not be entirely successful as a children’s film, but as the culmination of a lifetime love of the pure magic of film, and a manifestation of the notion that doing the thing that makes us the happiest will cause us to find our place in the world, this movie is a gift to be treasured and revisited.
Things do start out much as they look in the trailer. It’s the early 1930s, and our titular moppet (Asa Butterfield) has been recently orphaned, taken in by his drunken uncle after the death of his father. Both dad and uncle work with clocks: dad (Jude Law) was a clockmaker and lover of the fine intricacies of any clockwork creation, while his brother (Ray Winstone) maintains the clocks at the train station. Hugo has learned from both, and when the reclusive uncle succumbs to drink, the boy knows he can avoid the orphanage if the clocks keep running smoothly and everyone assumes his uncle is still winding them. While he’s doing this, he is attempting to restore a rusty old automaton, a clockwork man who, if he can fix it and find the key that fits in its back, he believes will deliver to him a message from his father.
Hugo keeps himself going thieving around the station, always two steps ahead of the inspector, played with Clouseau-esque awkwardness by Sacha Baron Cohen. He winds up meeting a young girl, Isabelle (Chloë Moretz), who has a taste for adventure that is routinely suppressed by her godfather and guardian, Georges (Ben Kingsley), the grumpy toyseller who unwittingly supplies the thieving Hugo with the pieces needed to restore the automaton.
There’s little in this section of the film that doesn’t feel like fairly standard children’s fantasy fare, with the bright colors, the digital sheen of the animated set as Scorsese’s camera swoops around the cavernous interior and dives down into the steam-filled tunnels and back hallways where Hugo makes his home. Little that’s not standard apart, that is, from the 3-D. Few films in the current revival of 3-D cinema have managed to justify the use of the medium, but Hugo is hands-down the best application of the new technology to date.
Scorsese, well aware of the problems of dimness created by 3-D glasses, compensates with a bright palette suffused with golden illumination that never seems too dark. He gives the film a crisp, Kurosawa-like depth of focus that, coupled with the perspective of the 3-D illusion, gives the screen real dimension. Dust motes drift lazily in the air of the station, never ostentatiously breaking out of the screen, but heightening the sense that one is looking through a window. Those trademark Scorsese visual cues, the long unbroken tracking shots and graceful movements are only magnified here. He knows exactly what this technology is capable of, and uses it for all it’s worth.
Midway through the film, upon finding out that Isabelle has never been to the movies, Hugo sneaks her into a theater where they catch a silent film, and the film begins to take a new turn. In that cinema, with Isabelle’s eyes wide with wonder at the notion of moving pictures, Scorsese captures, simply and emotionally, the experience of people in the early days of film staring at illuminated screens in enraptured wonder. It turns out, with these scene Scorses is just getting started.
From there the kids head to a library to read up about the history of film, and as they open a book and begin reading, the director gives us a montage of early silent film. When the writer of the book, René Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg) finds them reading, he tells them the story of seeing, as a child, the great early silent fantasist Georges Méliès at work, and Scorsese takes us into a flashback that suddenly feels like a DVD behind-the-scenes extra for an old Méliès film, had anyone thought to document that kind of thing at the time. Méliès turns to the boy and with a smile of childlike excitement, says to him, “If you’ve wondered where dreams come from, look around you: This is where they’re made.”
A walk through film history and a public service advertisement for the importance of film preservation may seem out of place in the kid’s adventure story that this film begins as, but that’s where the film goes. What’s more remarkable is that this never seems dry or self-indulgent on Scorsese’s part. The absolute joy in the entire medium of film that is on display in the film’s second half is so warm and inviting that even just that first montage in the library is enough to bring tears to the eyes.
The latter half of the film takes a true story as its basis, making the real-life story of Méliès (Ben Kingsley) the primary focus. Broken machines make Hugo sad, because he feels everything needs a purpose, and Méliès is just as broken a machine as that rusty automaton Hugo is trying to fix up. All these previously scattered characters and plotlines come together like the gears of a clock in the film’s final act, and one might be inclined to say they come together in entirely unlikely ways. But how likely are any of our dreams? This is Scorsese’s dream about the movies. A filmmaker’s best and only trick is to convince us that their dreams are the reality we see cast up on that screen. Consider me convinced.
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Hugo
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Written by John Logan, based on the book by Brian Selznick
Starring Asa Butterfield, Chloë Moretz, Ben Kingsley, Sacha Baron Cohen
Running time: 127 minutes
Rated PG for mild thematic material, some action/peril and smoking.
Opens today at theaters across the area.
