2011 seems poised to be the year when 3D became worth a damn, though frankly I've never really understood the animosity towards the technology and was marginally sold on it by the time the credits rolled on Coraline. But if irredeemable re-releases of The Lion King, Titanic and Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace in 3D do indeed make me want to dedicate the rest of my life to attempting to communicate coherently with squirrels, Martin Scorsese's tremendous and beautiful Hugo, which was written by John Logan, gives the technology a renewed sense of purpose and esteem in a marketplace that has long ago grown cynical under the weight of shallow opportunism and unreasonable greed.
Indeed, it is Scorsese's valiant charge to strike at the dark, oil-spurting metal heart that many believe is at the center of modern popular filmmaking and Hugo miraculously succeeds at not only representing a new paradigm of populist filmmaking, as he so often does, but also invoking and revisiting the thrill of invention that erupted in early filmmakers after they saw the first films by the Lumiere brothers. That thrill can be felt from the film's opening, digitally bucolic image of 1930s Paris before the camera swoops down into a humungous train station through hundreds of passing commuters and workers and up through a small speck of a station clock, in the tunnels and maze-like platforms that hold the cumbersome mechanisms that run the clocks, which the titular orphan (Asa Butterfield) winds, repairs and maintains daily.
It is the job poor Hugo was taught by his uncle (Ray Winstone sporting Emil Jannings facial hair) after his father (Jude Law) was killed in a museum fire. Mechanisms are a fascination and an expertise of young Hugo's and he uses his expertise not only to service the train station in the absence of his uncle but to resurrect one of the few things that he shared with his father, a mechanical figurine with the ability to draw and write. He scrounges for spare parts all over the train station, including in the booth of Papa Georges (an excellent Ben Kingsley), a grumpy toymaker with a precocious goddaughter named Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz, an increasingly talented performer). On the day Papa Georges catches Hugo, he goes near-catatonic at the sight of Hugo's father's notebook, which details the construction of the mechanical figure; it's as if he's seen a ghost.
In reality, Papa Georges is Georges Melies, the pioneering cinematic visionary behind Le voyage dans la lune, and a great deal of the rest of the film involves his post-war resurrection from curmudgeon back to a buoyantly creative and spirited artist. But the film is a miraculous mechanism itself and Scorsese makes it consistently clear that there are many agents of narrative and visual movement constantly at work on the screen. The key hub of movement is the train station, itself a visual vault back to the Lumiere brothers' L'Arrivee d'un train en gare de La Ciota, which is ruled over by a ruthless station inspector (a very good Sacha Baron Cohen) who is still both mentally and physically crippled by the Great War. The station never looks nor feels still, which is a credit to Scorsese's sense of early cinema as intrinsically a document of movement, and the battle between Hugo and the inspector, the relationship between Hugo and Isabelle, and Hugo and Melies keep the narrative wheels and cog in continuous and clever motion. The introduction of film scholar Rene Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg) begets events that offer even more detailed gazes at the ties between artistic expression, societal pressures and personal needs, and how these heavy burdens can weigh down the soul.
Hugo is countless things. At once a historical document of the perilous connections between the political and the artistic, a memory film about the birth of cinema's social place and place in the development of his own personal kaleidoscopic expressiveness, and an essay film on the crucial need for film preservation, the film's immense energy and endless sense of invention make it difficult to fully describe. Most interestingly, however, Hugo is a film aware of the practical knowledge that always accompanies the true poet's mind, and the Scorsese's visions routinely focus on technical know-how juxtaposed with a exuberantly creative mind. We see the technique, the persistent technical mind at work, but never are completely awoken from cinema's blissful dream state. Like Isabelle and Hugo in the throes of giggling wonder upon the sight of Harold Lloyd in Safety Last, we remain jubilantly exhilarated by the giddy, gorgeous lunacy cinema can so often allow. If nothing else, Hugo is a paean to that lunacy, easily marketed as the pitch-perfect family film it impossibly yet genuinely is.
Indeed, it is Scorsese's valiant charge to strike at the dark, oil-spurting metal heart that many believe is at the center of modern popular filmmaking and Hugo miraculously succeeds at not only representing a new paradigm of populist filmmaking, as he so often does, but also invoking and revisiting the thrill of invention that erupted in early filmmakers after they saw the first films by the Lumiere brothers. That thrill can be felt from the film's opening, digitally bucolic image of 1930s Paris before the camera swoops down into a humungous train station through hundreds of passing commuters and workers and up through a small speck of a station clock, in the tunnels and maze-like platforms that hold the cumbersome mechanisms that run the clocks, which the titular orphan (Asa Butterfield) winds, repairs and maintains daily.
It is the job poor Hugo was taught by his uncle (Ray Winstone sporting Emil Jannings facial hair) after his father (Jude Law) was killed in a museum fire. Mechanisms are a fascination and an expertise of young Hugo's and he uses his expertise not only to service the train station in the absence of his uncle but to resurrect one of the few things that he shared with his father, a mechanical figurine with the ability to draw and write. He scrounges for spare parts all over the train station, including in the booth of Papa Georges (an excellent Ben Kingsley), a grumpy toymaker with a precocious goddaughter named Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz, an increasingly talented performer). On the day Papa Georges catches Hugo, he goes near-catatonic at the sight of Hugo's father's notebook, which details the construction of the mechanical figure; it's as if he's seen a ghost.
In reality, Papa Georges is Georges Melies, the pioneering cinematic visionary behind Le voyage dans la lune, and a great deal of the rest of the film involves his post-war resurrection from curmudgeon back to a buoyantly creative and spirited artist. But the film is a miraculous mechanism itself and Scorsese makes it consistently clear that there are many agents of narrative and visual movement constantly at work on the screen. The key hub of movement is the train station, itself a visual vault back to the Lumiere brothers' L'Arrivee d'un train en gare de La Ciota, which is ruled over by a ruthless station inspector (a very good Sacha Baron Cohen) who is still both mentally and physically crippled by the Great War. The station never looks nor feels still, which is a credit to Scorsese's sense of early cinema as intrinsically a document of movement, and the battle between Hugo and the inspector, the relationship between Hugo and Isabelle, and Hugo and Melies keep the narrative wheels and cog in continuous and clever motion. The introduction of film scholar Rene Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg) begets events that offer even more detailed gazes at the ties between artistic expression, societal pressures and personal needs, and how these heavy burdens can weigh down the soul.
Hugo is countless things. At once a historical document of the perilous connections between the political and the artistic, a memory film about the birth of cinema's social place and place in the development of his own personal kaleidoscopic expressiveness, and an essay film on the crucial need for film preservation, the film's immense energy and endless sense of invention make it difficult to fully describe. Most interestingly, however, Hugo is a film aware of the practical knowledge that always accompanies the true poet's mind, and the Scorsese's visions routinely focus on technical know-how juxtaposed with a exuberantly creative mind. We see the technique, the persistent technical mind at work, but never are completely awoken from cinema's blissful dream state. Like Isabelle and Hugo in the throes of giggling wonder upon the sight of Harold Lloyd in Safety Last, we remain jubilantly exhilarated by the giddy, gorgeous lunacy cinema can so often allow. If nothing else, Hugo is a paean to that lunacy, easily marketed as the pitch-perfect family film it impossibly yet genuinely is.
