Hugo (2011) 8/10
Hugo (Asa Butterfield) is an orphan secretly living in the walls of a Paris train station in the 1930s, where he maintains the clocks. He becomes involved with Isabelle (Chloe Moretz) and her “grandpa” Georges (Ben Kingsley), who has a secret of his own. Directed by Martin Scorsese in 3D.
Hugo is a magical and beautiful film, and you will enjoy it. That’s important to say right off the bat because I have serious misgivings about this film, and yet, objectively, it’s magical and beautiful and lovely and I don’t think anything about my misgivings detracts from that.
The movie is filled with distinct and particular characters. As Hugo watches from above or below, individuals specific, tragic, funny, or mysterious are sketched with the perfect detail of curious voyeurism. These characters are played by a host of terrific actors, including Christopher Lee, Emma Watson, and Sacha Baron Cohen and, before the movie really starts, when we’re just setting the scene, it’s remarkably engaging.
Martin Scorsese is a masterful director, and in many ways, Hugo is a showcase for that. I have never imagined 3D used with such deftness. Scorsese, like many directors, uses it to explore an extraordinary space, and the journey through the train station and through Paris is exquisite. More than that, he seems to have taught himself to think in the medium. In a normal film, if something (or someone) emerges in the frame that should get your attention, it comes from the background, or comes into focus. Scorsese finds uniquely 3D ways to make the attention pop—I don’t know of another artist who has approached 3D with so much cognition.
What Hugo is really about, though, is the movies, strange as it may seem for a movie populated by an orphan, a mysterious automaton, a wounded conductor, and an expansive book shop. And while it is absolutely delightful about the movies, it is in lavishing love upon them that I think the movie missteps.
Scorsese is a film historian, and passionate about the cause of film preservation, and his particular passion bleeds into this film too much, to the point where it feels like a polemic. It’s like, The Artist says “We love the movies,” while Hugo says, “We love the movies, and you should too.” Spoilers ahead:
Hugo and Georges are in parallel. Hugo has a terrible tragedy—the loss of his father—and Georges, too, has a tragedy, about which he refuses to speak. It’s very important that the audience fully buy into Georges’s tragedy and the connection between these characters, because otherwise, what brings them together is far too much of a coincidence. So, to discover that the tragedy is lack of film preservation? This is set up as a sorrow equivalent to losing your parents, being homeless, and having to steal to eat.
Now, the movie doesn’t explicitly state that these are equivalent, but structurally, the movie lays these two sorrowful, lost characters on a course where they can heal each other of shared pain. Hugo’s sole possession of his father’s is the automaton they were trying, together, to fix (an automaton that bears a striking resemblance to Jude Law, who plays Hugo’s father). That automaton was created by Georges. Hugo has a secret (voyeuristic) crush on Isabelle, who happens to have the key that will unlock the automaton’s secret. It’s either a stupid coincidence or a kind of movie magic that brings people together to heal one another. And I don’t think it’s stupid, I really don’t. Those beautiful coincidences are a lot of what movies in general have always been about. Yet, again, the very nature of those coincidences, of the convergence, tells us that these people have a shared sorrow that can be mutually healed.
Georges is a tragic figure. Edge too close to his sorrow and he shuts down, becomes dark and foreboding (and it’s Ben Kingsley, so he sells the hell out of it). Finally, his sorrow is revealed: He was once a great filmmaker (Georges Méliès), his livelihood was destroyed when people lost interest in his films (the Great War, he says, turned people’s spirits darker and his films were too fanciful), and all his old films were destroyed in a fire.
The presentation of Méliès’s film career is indeed fanciful, and delightful, but at the end of his telling of his tragic tale, my reaction was, ‘Wait, that’s it?’ In this story, no one dies, no hearts are broken, the War’s effect is dispiriting the population, but there is no personal grief associated with it. In the end, Méliès has grieved for all these years, is cruel to children and silent with his wife, because films were not preserved. Oh, the humanity.
As a children’s movie, we are not surprised by a happy ending. Georges’s renewal leads to Hugo’s renewal, and their happiness spills over onto the many people we’ve met in the train station, and onto the audience. And yet, for me, a nagging doubt remains.
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