Scorsese’s ‘Hugo’ is ‘Best Picture’ front-runner…

By Christopher P. Jacobs
Movies Editor

Martin Scorsese is one of the world’s best and best-known film directors, noted especially for gritty crime dramas with Robert DeNiro or Leonardo DiCaprio, from “Taxi Driver” and “Cape Fear” to “The Departed” and “Shutter Island.” But his love of all kinds of movies and his versatility have also resulted in such diverse works like “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” “New York, New York,” “The Last Waltz,” “After Hours,” “The Last Temptation of Christ,” “The Age of Innocence,” and “The Aviator.”

In “The Aviator,” Scorsese explored the personality of troubled billionaire and airline pioneer Howard Hughes, but focused also on Hughes’ early passion for movie making. Scorsese’s latest film, “Hugo,” embodies his own passion for movies into his first family-friendly production, adapted from the children’s book “The Invention of Hugo Cabret.” It’s also Scorsese’s first movie shot in 3-D and his first shot with digital cameras instead of traditional film (mainly to simplify the process of three-dimensional photography, as he did not want to have it converted to 3-D after it was shot).

The story is mainly a personal odyssey of a little boy about 11 or 12 named Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) who lives alone in the depths of a Paris railroad station sometime around 1930. He keeps all of the station’s clocks running, and snatches food from the various station vendors to survive while trying to elude the station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen). We soon learn that he used to help his clockmaker father (Jude Law) fix mechanical things, and when his father died suddenly, Hugo was taken in by his alcoholic old Uncle Claude (Ray Winstone), who taught him his job of maintaining all the elaborate clockwork at the train station.

Hugo’s main passion is trying to repair an intriguingly complex but rusty old mechanical man his father had rescued from a museum that was about to discard it. To do that, he sketches the parts in a notebook his father started, and assembles as many spare clock parts that he can find, periodically stealing them from the shop of a gruff and bitter old toyseller (Ben Kingsley) who is the guardian of a precocious and adventurous little girl named Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz). Of course one day the old man catches Hugo and confiscates his notebook, leading to Hugo befriending Isabelle and the pair trying to solve the mystery of what this strange mechanical robot is supposed to do and how to make it work.

In the process, Hugo introduces Isabelle to the immersive escapism of the movies, which her guardian “Papa Georges” has forbidden her to attend, and Isabelle helps Hugo discover a new world of hidden but vivid imagination and information through books (including the history of movies, which come to life as they read about them), with the cooperation of a friendly old train station bookseller (Christopher Lee). The more they explore the worlds of movies and books and their own memories of family stories, the more they discover how interrelated they are to each other and to unlocking the secret of the mysterious mechanical man.

The cast is excellent all around, with Butterfield and Moretz wonderful as the two children. Kingsley could well earn an Oscar nomination for his deeply affecting performance as the tragic parallel real-life hero of the story, who is himself the “missing gear” that ties everything together and is the underlying reason for the entire film. But the film is more than its main characters. Scorsese pulls together an amazing ensemble of memorable people who inhabit the busy daily world of the train station, and whose lives sometimes interlock or overlap with those of the main characters. Scorsese even does an amusing cameo himself during one of the flashbacks.
Scorsese’s love and encyclopedic knowledge of film history are apparent throughout the film, with numerous homages to classic films, to the mechanics of film and photographic technology (including early color processes), and to the pure fun of creativity with a movie camera. The 3-D is also very nicely done. At times he incorporates clips from actual original silent films, as well as recreating the earliest years of filmmaking. In fact in the short time since the release of “Hugo,” the Flicker Alley DVD box set of all the surviving films of Georges Méliès has sold out and is now being revised and updated for a new edition!

On the surface “Hugo” is a gripping and engrossing juvenile mystery-adventure story for all ages that develops into a heartwarming human tale of family, inter-generational connections, hopes, dreams, and personal sense of purpose. At the same time, however, “Hugo” is clever celebration of the movies as a valuable part of our lives and culture, an entertaining education in the basics of early cinema, and a persuasive editorial urging the preservation of films (and books, for that matter). Like J. J. Abrams’ “Super 8” earlier this year dramatized the joy of making movies through the eyes of children, Scorsese’s “Hugo” dramatizes, again through the eyes of children, the joy of discovering the magic of movies that they never even realized existed.

“Hugo” has already been chosen as the Best Picture of 2011 by the National Board of Review and other groups of critics, and is sure to be a strong contender for multiple Academy Awards over the next two months. It’s a must-see for anyone who likes movies.

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