Nobody gets blown away in Hugo, the magnificent new movie by Martin Scorsese. Nor does America’s master of cinematic violence rely on an anxiety-ridden neurotic to drive the story as he did in Raging Bull and Taxi Driver.
Instead, the PG-rated Hugo rides on the slender shoulders of 12-year-old actor Asa Butterfield, who plays the title character, an orphaned boy who lives in a train station. And while the movie might seem uncharacteristically mellow, it retains the Scorsese signature in at least one regard: The film looks fantastic.
From 1973’s Mean Streets on, the 69-year-old filmmaker has kept audiences on edge by dangling the prospect that, any minute now, something horrible was about to happen. Hugo promises that, any minute now, something wondrous will take place.
Teaming again with production designer Dante Ferretti, cinematographer Bob Richardson and The Aviator scribe John Logan, Scorsese has fashioned from Brian Selznick’s book The Invention of Hugo Cabret a gorgeous steampunk vision of 1930s Paris.
A master re-creator of bygone urban worlds ranging from 19th-century New York (Gangs of New York) to 1970s Las Vegas (Casino), this time around Scorsese conjures imagery that looks like it could have leapt off the pages of a lavishly illustrated pop-up book. His camera swoops through and around gleaming gears and flywheels, levers and pulleys, pistons and locomotives.
The plot is pretty straightforward: Hugo meets Isabelle (played by Kick-Ass‘ Chloë Grace Moretz) and together they figure out the connection between a mysterious automaton and a grumpy toy merchant (Ben Kingsley). After the death of Hugo’s clockmaker father (Jude Law), the boy lives in the secret compartments of a train station and takes over a drunken uncle’s duties as keeper of the depot’s massive clocks.
It’s a sweet saga with no real villains. Even the station gendarme with a bum leg (played by Sacha Baron Cohen of Borat fame) who hectors Hugo throughout most of the film turns out to be a pretty nice guy. Unlike in Scorsese’s previous films, criminal behavior is confined to the swiping of croissants by the spindly-legged Hugo. As you’d expect from a director known for his 60 takes-and-more perfectionism, the actors deliver poised performances.
Clocking in at just over two hours, Hugo would have succeeded as a handsomely mounted family adventure had it closed down around the 90-minute mark. But Scorsese then pivots the entire enterprise by shifting gears for a transcendent third-act display of cinemaphile showmanship.
(Spoiler alert: Major plot point follows.)
Kingsley’s grumpy toy store owner turns out to be real-life French film pioneer Georges Méliès, whose 1902 silent movie A Trip to the Moon became a sci-fi landmark. Kingsley’s embittered version of Méliès had to sell the celluloid from his movie archive for scrap because his fantastical silent films lost favor after World War I. When the kids discover Méliès’ true identity, it gives Scorsese a splendid excuse to revisit cinematic history.
Technology changes, but astute filmmakers survive by embracing innovation for their own ends.
Clips include Harold Lloyd‘s famous clock-tower sequence from Safety Last!, later mirrored in the film by Hugo, along with color movies that were hand-tinted frame by frame. The flashbacks tacitly make the point: Technology changes, but astute filmmakers survive by embracing innovation for their own ends.
Happily, cheap stereoscopic tricks are nowhere to be found in Scorsese’s bag of 3-D tricks. Audiences learn during a bravura opening sequence that the filmmaker has sacrificed none of his shot-making acumen. Mirroring Scorsese’s famous Goodfellas sequence in which a steadicam pulled viewers through a nightclub kitchen in a continuous shot, Scorsese starts this movie with an aerial view of picture-postcard Paris before swooping in with the 3-D cameras to immerse viewers in Hugo‘s bustling train-station universe.
Snow falls “on the audience,” per the familiar 3-D maneuver, but it’s done so tastefully that you feel enveloped in the Parisian night sky rather than buffeted by cheap-looking digital effects. And when Cohen leans his lantern-jawed mug so that it’s cantilevered over the audience, the imposition serves dramatic purpose, since he invades Hugo’s personal space with an obnoxious lack of restraint.
All the shots are so beautifully framed, Hugo will also work in old-fashioned 2-D. Throughout the film, Butterfield’s young Hugo dominates the running/jumping/hiding/almost-getting-run-over-by-a-train action sequences and provides plenty of heart as the kid who wants to “fix” broken people, broken watches and broken robots.
But Méliès grabs all the best lines. Speaking, no doubt, for the director, Kingsley’s character closes the curtain on Hugo from the stage of an old-fashioned proscenium with an appeal that could just as well come from Scorsese himself: “I address you as you truly are … mermaids, adventurers, magicians — come and dream with me.”
WIRED Gorgeous to look at; steampunk has never looked so elegant; kid-friendly love letter to the early days of moviemaking.
TIRED Must every film that takes place in Paris be filled with berets and those darn accordions?
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