Hugo Reviews

Martin Scorsese leaves his mean streets behind for this exhilarating family tale inspired by the birth of cinema.
The families we most associate with Martin Scorsese are the five criminal ones that make up the mafia in the United States, and both they and Scorsese's films deal in violence involving pain and death. His new film, however, aims to entrance every member of every family, and it centres on the great art form that over the past century became the great family entertainment: the cinema. A dramatic pursuit many see as essentially violent and once described by the art theorist Herbert Read as "a chisel of light cutting into the reality of objects", it is created with a demand for "Action!" and ends with the order "Cut!". Based on The Invention of Hugo Cabret, a beautiful book, half graphic novel, half prose tale, by Brian Selznick, the movie is a delightful fable. Its various subjects include magic, tradition, respect for the past and affection between generations, all bound up in the history of the cinema and the machinery invented to capture images on strips of film and project them on screens.
Hugo is set in Paris in 1931 and begins with a breathtaking shot of the city, as the camera swoops down on to a busy railway station. It flies along a narrow platform between two steam trains, crosses a busy concourse and ends up on the 12-year-old Hugo, who is peering at the world from behind the figure "4" of a giant clock. Hugo (Asa Butterfield) has inherited a love of tinkering with machinery from his late father, and has quite recently taken over the job of superintending the station's clocks from his drunken uncle. The boy lives in the hidden tunnels and passageways of the building, where he's repairing a 19th-century automaton. He's a crafty Dickensian orphan, a benign phantom of the opera, a blood brother of Quasimodo, a cinematic voyeur looking out on the world like the photographer in Hitchcock's Rear Window. Fate has brought him there, and it then draws him into the orbit of a querulous old man, Georges (Ben Kingsley), who runs an old-fashioned shop on the station selling toys and doing mechanical repairs, assisted by his 12-year-old god-daughter, Isabelle. Hugo becomes involved with the old man when he's accused of theft and has a cherished book of drawings confiscated. He is then assisted by Isabelle in retrieving the book, and in turn, when he discovers she's forbidden to go to the movies, he takes her on a great "adventure", a visit to the lost world of silent movies at a season of old films. She is overwhelmed.

The literate Isabelle is a great admirer of Dickens, and a succession of clever Dickensian twists ensue as the labyrinthine plot takes the pair on a journey into a mysterious past. They discover the origins of the movies in the late-19th-century careers of the Lumière brothers, who put on the first picture show in Paris in 1895, and Georges Méliès, the professional magician, who became obsessed after attending this historical screening. The Lumières photographed the world as it was and didn't believe the cinema had a future. Méliès turned his theatre into a picture palace, built his own studio and became a prolific producer of fantasy films that merged life and dream, before his business tragically collapsed and he disappeared into obscurity.
In following the example of his early hero, John Cassavetes, in making naturalistic pictures, Scorsese set out on the route pioneered by the Lumière brothers, but from time to time slipped into the parallel path taken by Méliès as, for instance, in New York, New York. Now, with this celebration of magic and the imaginative use of 3D, he is saluting what many will see as an alternative kind of cinema to his own. But Scorsese has always been fascinated by the all-involving experience of moviegoing and has a knowledge of and affection for film history matched by few directors of his generation. Since the 1970s he has used his influence and his money to campaign for the restoration and preservation of films.

Hugo is a moving, funny and exhilarating film, an imaginative history lesson in the form of a detective story. The film is a great defence of the cinema as a dream world, a complementary, countervailing, transformative force to the brutalising reality we see all around us. It rejects the sneers of those intellectuals and moralisers who see in film a debilitating escapism of the sort the social anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker impugned by calling her study of the movie industry Hollywood: The Dream Factory. As a commentary on this, Hugo at one point has a double dream, waking from one into the other, both of them forms of nightmares connected to the cinema.

Appropriately for a medium initially launched in France (where it is still taken more seriously than anywhere else) but developed almost simultaneously in a variety of countries, Hugo is an international movie with a wonderfully gifted team behind it. The photographer (Robert Richardson), editor (Thelma Schoonmaker) and screenwriter (John Logan) are American, the production designer (Dante Ferretti) Italian, the costume designer (Sandy Powell) and the cast British (except for the delightful young American Chloë Grace Moretz as Isabelle), and it was made in this country.

Georges Méliès, the ultimate hero of the film, became a magician while working in London and returned there to buy his first projector. One of the movie's endless felicitous touches occurs during a whirlwind chase, when Hugo is pursued by the vindictive station inspector through the crowded concourse. The camera briefly alights on a startled James Joyce, then a resident of Paris, who had returned in 1909 to Dublin to open the city's first purpose-built cinema, the Volta. Appropriately its premiere kicked off with a short called The First Paris Orphanage. At the time Hugo is set, Joyce was writing Finnegans Wake, a novel in the form of a dream in which he refers to the Marx brothers.

The Guardian

"I'd imagine the whole world was one big machine. Machines never come with any extra parts, you know. They always come with the exact amount they need. So I figured, if the entire world was one big machine, I couldn't be an extra part. I had to be here for some reason."

With its PG rating, 2011's Hugo is the first Martin Scorsese project that could be considered a kids movie. However, it's not aimed specifically at children - this is a movie made by a lover of a cinema for lovers of cinema. While kids will likely be transfixed by Hugo's gorgeous visuals, the story's messages may be too cerebral and advanced for inexperienced minds. Meanwhile, older audiences and cinema aficionados will get the most out of this film, as they'll be able to comprehend the material laying underneath the picture's lush exterior. Based on the novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick (a distant cousin of David O. Selznick), Scorsese's latest film has a few issues in the scripting department, but its positives far outweigh the negatives. And while it's not the greatest 3-D movie in history, Hugo stands as one of 3-D's largest benefactors (right alongside Avatar). Planned and filmed in three dimensions, this is a film which demonstrates the format's marvellous capabilities when a master filmmaker is in the driving seat.

An orphan secretively living in a Parisian train station during the 1930s, Hugo Cabret (Butterfield) is a gifted clock-maker who spends his time maintaining the station's large system of clocks. His primary passion, though, is restoring a mysterious automaton recovered by his late father (Law) that may hold profound secrets. But Hugo is a menace and a thief to those working at the train station, and he has to frantically avoid the Station Inspector (Cohen) as he goes about his daily business. When his latest attempt at thievery is caught by toy shop owner George (Kingsley), Hugo's beloved notebook is taken from him. While working to get it back, Hugo befriends young Isabelle (Moretz), who's enthralled by the boy's proclivity for adventures and machines. The lives of Hugo and Isabelle become irreversibly rocked, however, when secrets about George's past begin to come flooding out.

The key issue with Hugo is one of structure. The flick is split into two distinct halves, bringing about a borderline schizophrenic identity crisis. The movie's first half deals with Hugo's covert everyday life at the train station, but everything changes at the halfway point: Hugo disappears into the background as another characters takes to the fore, with the picture abandoning the story of survival and friendship to instead extol the importance of film preservation. It's a bold move that doesn't entirely work; the title implies that this is Hugo's personal story, but he doesn't grow much as a character throughout the film. Instead, the character arcs are allotted to a supporting player who's suddenly promoted to protagonist. Both stories are admittedly interesting, but only on their own merits, and the merger feels awkward. Consequently, Hugo lacks cohesiveness. Additionally, Hugo is at times dramatically poor. This problem is especially glaring in relation to the Station Inspector, whose character arc feels forced to a cringe-worthy extent. No real tension or conflict stems from the inspector's growth as a character; it only leads to eye-rolls.

Script and structuring problems aside, Hugo is a heroically-detailed visual feast which doesn't merely use 3-D to inflate profits. See, more than just a tale about its titular character, Hugo is a love letter to cinema. It traces cinema's origins, detailing early filmic endeavours and ending with several moving scenes effectively underscoring the magic of the movies. With Hugo, Scorsese explores a time when people thought motion pictures as a whole were just a fad in the late 19th Century, serving as a brilliant comparison to those who call 3-D a gimmick in this day and age. Thus, the 3-D is not merely a cinematic trick here; it's inherently tied to the narrative's central messages. Hugo even contains a re-enactment of the famous screening of Arrival of a Train at the Station, when naïve audiences leapt out of the way in fear that the train was coming for them. Days like those are long gone, but Scorsese clearly longs for this level of engagement, and has used 3-D to try and achieve a similar effect. It's invigorating for a 21st Century film to introduce such concepts in an era when cinema is predominantly exploited for profits by studio treadmills rather than artists passionate about the medium.

And how are the 3-D effects, you ask? Absolutely magnificent. Since Hugo was a 3-D movie from the outset, every shot and angle was tailored with extra-dimensional effects in mind. Mixed with the luscious production design and Robert Richardson's exceptional cinematography, Hugo looks immaculate; Scorsese and co. have created a staggering fantasyland, taking us on a tour inside this labyrinthine train station with utmost imagination. It's enthralling to watch the intricate machinery at work in three dimensions, too. Even though Scorsese's pacing is not always spot-on (the film feels done after the first half ends, and it hits the doldrums for a good 10 minutes), the rest of the production team have done a fabulous job. Howard Shore's whimsically majestic score is especially impressive.

As Hugo Cabret, young Asa Butterfield (Boy in the Stripes Pyjamas) is expressive and charming, not to mention affecting when the occasion calls for it. Butterfield is not one of those stereotypically cute kids; he earns our sympathy through the strength of his acting. Alongside him, the always-reliable Chloë Grace Moretz is incredibly endearing as Isabelle. She's a cute girl, but she also excels as an actress; she grabs your attention whenever she's on-screen. Digging into the supporting cast, Ben Kingsley is at his best here in years. Called upon to go through a range of complex emotions and tasked with playing younger versions of himself, Kingsley was up to the challenge, and never treads a foot wrong. Meanwhile, Sacha Baron Cohen is spot-on as the harsh Station Inspector. Another standout is Michael Stuhlbarg (recognisable as the star of A Serious Man) playing a film historian who becomes pivotal to the narrative in the second half. It's hard to pinpoint the exact reason why Stuhlbarg is so good here; he just has a pleasant aura about him, and his dialogue is delivered with pitch-perfection conviction. Not to mention, he genuinely looks the part.

Hugo has problems, but it's hard to imagine anyone walking away feeling entirely let down by this audacious picture. Not merely eye candy, the film comes packaged with provocative messages, and it leaves you convinced that the 3-D format can work in deft hands. But while the 3-D's immense fluidity and astonishing sense of depth would make James Cameron jealous, the script cannot quite hold its own against the visuals.

6.8/10

Throughout his 30+ year career as a film director, Martin Scorsese has gone on to make feature films that have become some of the most violent and sinister crime films in the history of cinema from the likes of Goodfellas, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Departed and Cape Fear. However, in 2011 he makes something entirely different that is beyond anything that he has ever done, and although he has taken a vast turn towards almost the opposing genre to what he has previously worked on, he goes on to make yet another masterpiece that takes us on an absolutely magnificent journey about the history of films and expresses a whole new side to him that took us all so long to witness.


Ever since the re-birth of 3D that began with James Cameron’s Avatar, it has become a money-grubbing gimmick but at the same time, has been a phenomenon by experiencing cinema at a whole new level. Having said that there haven’t been many films to have reached the realistic and dazzling level of 3D for a very long time, Hugo manages to avoid being a film that gets slapped, so to speak, by using the 3D gimmick to gain more money. So, it proves that paying for 3D tickets really is worth the money as it demonstrates what 3D is all about, it moves you a step closer to it feeling like reality and the film as a whole expresses the magic of movies and there is no greater experience.


Only until recently, we saw the legendary Steven Spielberg go beyond anything he had ever done as he went on to make his first animated feature film The Adventures Of Tintin, and proudly Martin Scorsese does the same as he provides a whole new side to not only himself as a director and the forthcoming fate of 3D but the spiritual magic of cinema from the past and for the upcoming future. Hugo literally became a film that is split into two as it begins with a beautiful heart-warmer for children, but progresses and becomes a very emotional and enchanting bio-pic of how cinema truly began. John Logan, who’s previous written screenplays have included Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street, Edward Zwick’s The Last Samurai, goes on to write his second screenplay in a Martin Scorsese film (first was The Aviator) and magically balances the charm and magic with the heartfelt emotion and witty humour for children and adults alike.


Hugo may be Scorsese’s first family film but it is also his first feature film without Leonardo DiCaprio ever since Bringing Out The Dead in 1999 as he brings forth a brand new ensemble cast. Asa Butterfield, who gave a breakthrough performance in The Boy In The Striped Pajamas does an absolutely fantastic job as Hugo Cabret, who resembles famous Disney prince Aladdin. Butterfield gets yet another breakthrough and becomes one of the best child stars of this generation. Chloe Grace Moretz already hit the mark as one of the greatest child actors after her mind-blowing and breath-taking performance in Kick-Ass but this time, she expresses Isabelle as not only a cute young girl, but also with a very mature nature. Ben Kingsley perhaps had the most on his shoulders as he portrayed the toy shop owner, later revealed to be the late French filmmaker and illusionist Georges Méilés. Kingsley, who has portrayed real-life people on more than one occasion, provides the realistic feeling that he himself was the backbone of cinema, so to speak, and delivers a fantastic performance!


From a personal perspective, Sacha Baron Cohen was the true star of Hugo because now after seeing Hugo and is scheduled to be in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, he really is an actor to be reckoned with as he gives a very funny (similar kind of humour as to what we’ve seen him in before) and yet a very genuine performance. Hugo has become his breakthrough in the genre of drama. Ray Winstone, Jude Law, Emily Mortimer, Richard Griffiths, Helen McCrory, Frances de la Tour and Christopher Lee add more warmth to the film with their casual supporting appearances. Plus, co-producer Johnny Depp makes one appearance in a shot during the film. The most overwhelming aspect about the cast and their performances is that despite the majority involved are British and American actors, it still grasps the reality of Hugo really being in the French capital city of Paris.


Overall, Hugo is an enchanting and magical masterpiece that is without a doubt one of Martin Scorsese’s finest achievements and is a perfect film for kids and adults. It is also a huge inspiration to movie fanatics and is literally like a love letter to them and to some of the greatest actors, directors and crew members of the past! This will undoubtedly be a very strong contender for Best Picture and after how this has turned out, it will be a very difficult task for any other film of 2011 to triumph over this one!