Hugo | Film review

 

Can Martin Scorsese make a generation of young viewers as nostalgic for film preservation as they are for Ninja Turtles or Muppets? Faithfully adapted from Brian Selznick’s award-winning novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the director’s first foray into children’s filmmaking isn’t Harry Potter 9. Its eponymous orphan loves an altogether more familiar form of magic: the movies.

Hugo is, first and foremost, a personal project—a tribute from one great artist to another. A major character is Georges Méliès, the pioneering filmmaker (including the legendary 1902 short, “A Trip to the Moon”) known for his experimentation with in-camera tricks, special effects, superimposition and most of the basic devices we associate with the cinema of the fantastic.

To pay homage to such an innovator, Scorsese has responded, appropriately enough, by pushing the boundaries of the medium. In ways both obvious and eccentric, Hugo boasts the most elaborate and exciting use of live-action 3-D to emerge from the recent vanguard. Robert Richardson’s camera immerses us in the metal beams and crunching gears and steam wafts of the Paris train station where Hugo (confident newcomer Asa Butterfield) winds the clocks.

As readers of Selznick's 2008 Caldecott Medal-winner know, Hugo strikes up a sometimes-tense relationship with a toy seller in the station (Ben Kingsley) and his goddaughter (Chloë Grace Moretz), because the merchant has the gears and springs Hugo needs to repair an automaton, a primitive robot the boy’s late father had acquired. Expanding from the novel, the movie generously devotes time to the comedy of station life, including a considerably expanded role for Sacha Baron Cohen, who portrays the sneering, bushy-mustached stationmaster who seeks to sentence Hugo to an orphanage

Even when the narrative stalls, the periphery asserts itself as the director’s true playhouse. A bedroom’s art direction has been replicated from an acknowledged influence, René Clair’s Under the Roofs of Paris. The automaton’s design borrows from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. And no film with a tower would be complete without a Vertigo nod, so Hugo doesn’t disappoint. More quirkily, the color scheme subtly emphasizes the reds and blues, as if the entire film were being seen through old-fashioned ’50s 3-D glasses.

Most of all, Hugo seems fundamentally autobiographical—a fable about a boy’s discovery of the pleasures of the movies. You can picture the lad growing up to make a film like ... well, like Hugo.