Martin Scorsese's Hugo exerts a tremendous, gravitational pull upon anyone who loves movies. To watch Scorsese, a master of cinema, deconstruct the art form itself is thrilling, instructive, and gratifying; to experience it in 3D is mind-expanding. It's the first truly great use of 3D in motion pictures as a means of extended enchantment.
Oddly, perhaps, Hugo outwardly pushes away intellectual analysis, presenting itself as a simple fantasy. Yet it's an intelligent children's story that refuses to pander, and enraptured many of the young ones at an advance screening I attended. While it can be taken at face value, the film contains layers of meaning waiting to be unwrapped.
While I was watching Hugo, I was both fascinated and distracted. Its subject is time, and it refuses to hurry, so that allowed opportunity for my contradictory feelings to war with each other. My own sense of wonder insists that Hugo is a must-see in theaters, in 3D if you can, even if its imperfections sometimes undermine its own good intentions.
Young Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield, believably stressed) is an orphan living inside the walls of the Paris train station in the 1930s, a whiz kid who was brought up by his clockmaker father (Jude Law) to become a magician of space and time. Hugo is blessed with an innate sense of mechanics; combined with his father's training, he is well-positioned to keep all the clocks in the train station running on time.
Notwithstanding his abilities, Hugo is an orphan during the Great Depression, so he lives a precarious day-to-day existence, stealing food from markets and passing delivery carts, and also hiding from the persnickety Station Inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen, in a generally restrained performance). The Inspector suffered a debilitating leg injury during the Great War, forcing him to wear a metal leg brace that occasionally locks up on him, and serving as a bell on a cat's neck for Hugo.
What commands Hugo's interest is a toy shop in the station run by the snarling Georges (Ben Kingsley, who is sharp and affecting). It's not so much the toys, though, as what's inside them: gears and pendulums and nuts and bolts and screws and things. Hugo's fascination is more of an obsession, but when Georges catches him stealing and demands the contents of his pockets, it's Hugo's notebook -- with drawings of a mechanical man -- that steals Georges' attention.
The notebook becomes the driving force for the narrative, as it provides the key to the short, difficult life story of Hugo, as well as the locked door leading to Georges' past life, a door that he desperately wants to keep closed.
Hugo gains a friend in Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz, delightfully not Hit Girl), who has lived with "Papa Georges" and "Mama Jeanne" (Helen McCrory) since her parents died. Isabelle loves books, frequently borrowing classics from the alternately kindly and stern book shop owner Monsieur Labisse (the great Christopher Lee). But she greatly desires "an adventure," something that Papa Georges actively discourages, and so when she hears of Hugo's woes, she decides that she will help him.
In turn, Hugo introduces her to a different way of life. Among other things, he sneaks her into her first movie (Harold Lloyd's Safety Last!), something that Papa Georges forbids. Isabelle can't understand why -- the cinema experience is altogether delightful to her -- and that eventually leads to the uncovering of Georges' past.
Adapted by John Logan from "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," a Caldecott-winning book written and illustrated by Brian Selznick, and first published in 2007, Hugo feels like an elegantly stripped-down big-screen version, allowing plenty of room for Scorsese to color outside the lines.
Scorsese has never before ventured into such family-friendly territory, and has seldom featured children, or even young teens, in major roles. (When he has, it's been on the grittier side, as with the smart-ass Tommy (Alfred Lutter III) in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and the wise-beyond-her-years prostitute Iris in Taxi Driver (Jodie Foster, who also played opposite Lutter in Alice.) Scorsese struggled to bring life to the stiff The Age of Innocence, a PG-rated period piece from 1993 that faintly resembles Hugo in its archaic code of conduct and the press of societal manners.
Hugo is a more lively, friendly, vital affair, though it also suffers from a gentle distancing from the harsh realities of the times. It's an optimistic view of life; despite the hard times Hugo has experienced, he remains resolute in his determination to remain connected to his late father, and dismisses his evident hunger and dismal living conditions as facts of life, to be endured until he can complete one last great project.
The bittersweet edge of the story is forgotten, however, when Hugo pitches forth into the eye-opening early days of the cinema, when imagination had to be handcrafted and the only limitations were life itself. Lovingly recreated, they absolve Hugo from its sins, establishing it as a lovely movie in love with movies.
Hugo is not "pure cinema." It's just as concerned with story and characters as it is with the visual delights that are poured onto the screen. It may, in fact, be too much in love with movies to qualify as great cinema itself, too distracted by the possibilities to remain reined into the central focus of the family at the heart of the story. In that, it's pure, late Scorsese, which means it's still essential viewing.
Hugo, which also features Michael Stuhlbarg, Ray Winstone, Emily Mortimer, Frances de la Tour, and Richard Griffiths in small roles, opens wide across the U.S. tomorrow. Check local listings for theaters and showtimes.