Movie Review: Scorsese Brings Hugo to Life
RSSBy Kent Turner
Martin Scorsese's film adaptation of Brian Selznick's Caldecott-winning novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Scholastic, 2007), has remained faithful to its source. If anything, the tone's similar to the guileless and irony-free 1950s/1960s live-action films produced by Walt Disney. Sentiment, not the 3-D special effects, propels the story line. That said, the shifting perspectives during the chase scenes look great. And yes, there are roller-coaster tracking shots as one would expect from the director of GoodFellas.) A young orphan named Hugo (Asa Butterfield) lives within the walls of a Paris train station circa 1931, looking after its clocks and trying to restore a strange automaton. He hopes that once the contraption made of nuts and bolts is repaired, it will write a secret message from his dead father (Jude Law). But penniless, the 12-year-old resorts to stealing the needed parts from a toy store—until he's caught. As part of his daily routine, Hugo also swipes a croissant and a bottle of milk from a nearby café, but the film's veritable thief is the scene-stealing Chloë Grace Moretz as Isabelle, Hugo's problem-solving sidekick. She's the goddaughter of the cranky toy seller (Ben Kingsley), and she happens to have the key that makes the automaton work. With her help, the mechanical man comes to life and draws a clue that links Isabelle's godfather's past to the birth of cinema. The only Yank among the lead actors, Moretz sports a spot-on posh accent and a Mostly, the film breezes by. (Readers of the book can expect at least one scene with a train barreling toward the audience, but two?) The only distracting note for such a sensitively told film is the portrayal of the officious station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), a role beefed up considerably from the book. At first he appears an object of ridicule, hopping and flailing about with a creaky metal leg brace while clumsily pursuing Hugo through the station. In a gag that never works, his brace gets stuck again and again, immobilizing him. Like Selznick in the source novel, Scorsese makes an eloquent plea to remember the past. In Hugo the most indelible images are movie clips from the silent era, featuring Buster Keaton, Louise Brooks (who exudes so much sex appeal she might be responsible for the PG rating), Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks. When a character in the film remarks that movies are where dreams are made, it's no mere boast. Directed by Martin Scorsese 127 min. Rated PG (for no obvious reason; it should be rated G) This article originally appeared in the newsletter Extra Helping. Go here to subscribe.
November 22, 2011
Photos courtesy of Paramount Pictures
bly fits in with her British co-stars Kingsley and Helen McCrory, even though all characters are supposed to be French. (By comparison, Butterfield is flatly unresponsive.) In a significant departure from the book, Isabelle's not as scrappy. She's more observant, and it's Hugo who picks the locks. But there's a trade-off. It's Isabelle who takes on the role of narrator, not Hugo, as in Selznick's book, and they work to piece together the toy seller's past, instead of fighting each other.
Perhaps it takes a heavyweight filmmaker like Scorsese, also a noted advocate for film preservation, to make a movie where the climax is the rediscovery and unspooling of a black-and-white silent film, "A Trip to the Moon" (1902), by the French magician-turned film pioneer Georges Méliès. Méliès's rudimentary man-made effects even trump Hugo's whiz-bang visuals.
