Hugo
Directed By: Martin
Scorsese
Written By: John
Logan, based on the book The Invention of
Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
Starring: Asa
Butterfield, Chloe Grace Mortez, Sacha Baron Cohen, Ben Kingsley, Ray Winstone,
Emily Mortimer, Christopher Lee, Helen McCrory, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Jude Law
Director of Photographer: Robert Richardson, Editor: Thelma
Schoonmaker, Production Designer: Dante Ferretti, Original Music: Howard Shore
Rated: PG
In
1989, film history Tom Gunning wrote a highly influential essay entitled “The
Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde.” Mr.
Gunning examined how film historians had written about the early yore of silent
cinema and its push toward narrative cinema. But he proposed that the
attraction of the works of Thomas Edison and the Lumiere brothers was not based
on seeing stories, but seeing things move. The cinema itself, the spectacle of
movement, was its primary attraction. Stories came later; cinema was born out
of this attraction of the possibilities of cinema could show or do anything we
could think up.
It
is this love of spectacle that has obviously drawn Martin Scorsese to make one
of his most ambitious, pictures of his career and one of his most
self-conscious films. Hugo, an
adaptation of a young adult novel by Brian Selznick looks like a strange
departure for a director as it follows a story of a child in somewhat of a
fairy tale. But Hugo is much more
than that, a bold, genre-crossing picture that is both narrative and spectacle,
and ultimately a film essay on the importance of the origins of cinema, and the
need to preserve classic film as well.
The
first thirty minutes of Hugo doesn’t
exactly hint at any sort of reflexive story, however. In a mostly silent
prologue, Mr. Scorsese zooms his camera through the landscape of a Paris train
station, full of characters and quirks. It’s the 1920s and young Hugo Cabret
(Asa Butterfield) lives among the clocks of the train station while avoiding
the detecting eyes of a bumbling but stern inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) on the
hunt for orphans like himself. As he winds the clocks of the gargantuan
station, Mr. Scorsese takes us through the gears and lights that make the
things turn, an obsession with not only the bigger picture but the ones inside
as well. Hugo’s main goal is to rebuild an anatomical robot that he believes
contains a secret message from his dead father. The only way to get the pieces,
though, is to steal than from a mysterious man in a toyshop.
That
mysterious man, played effortlessly by Ben Kingsley, holds a dark secret that
not even his adopted daughter (Chloe Grace Mortez) knows about. As Mr. Scorsese
brings us through the early machinations of the plot, he keeps his pace a
little more staid and stilted than usual, though some might develop from the
performances as well; Mr. Butterfield hasn’t developed into a natural actor
yet, and Ms. Mortez has become too comfortable playing years beyond her actual
age to really play a child. The comic pieces with Mr. Baron Cohen, a natural
actor of the buffoonish, also feels oddly out of place, especially when Hugo opens up from simply a child’s
adventure to a wondrous story about the early ages of cinema.
Those
who know Mr. Scorsese well know that he is as much film historian as filmmaker
and has worked diligently with Film Foundation to restore important classics
that are diluted and forgotten by the age of time (he has recently began
touring a gorgeous new print of the Powell & Pressburger masterpiece The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp). So
it makes sense that clocks populate the world of Hugo, as time is the enemy for old cinema, and the people we least
suspect are the masters of the past. Soon, Hugo learns about the Lumiere
brothers, the Edison shorts, and, most importantly, Georges Méliès, the
filmmaker behind many fantasy films, including A Trip to the Moon.
While
some have read Hugo as basically the
most expensive advertisement ever produced for Film Foundation, Hugo delights itself in helping us
understand the magic of classic cinema. Mr. Scorsese ends up recreating many of
the Méliès shorts in his films, popping them up with color (the old films were
tinted by hand) and really showing off the spectacle and the fun of watching
them. Hugo says that his father thought cinema showed him his dreams in waking
life, and watching how much Mr. Scorsese indulges in these images proves that
point.
As
much as the director is going back in the past, Mr. Scorsese heads toward the
future of cinema as well. Shooting in digital 3D, Mr. Scorsese’s world might be
the past, but its alive with such color and depth that looks much more alive than
any other film today. This of course thanks to the great work of Mr. Scorsese's collaborators: production designer Dante Feretti and his epic sets, the gorgeously rich lighting of Robert Richardson, and the editing of Themla Shoonmaker. The 3D effects are mostly subtle and not particularly
jaw-dropping, except for a moment when he recreates the famous shot from A Trip to the Moon, with the moon
popping out of the screen as the spaceship crashes into it.
The reason for such antics from Mr.
Scorsese seems simple—cinema is a spectacle, and the act of watching movies, of
seeing movement, fantastic worlds, gigantic sets, or flat images popping out of
the screen, is what attracted people to the movies at first. It makes sense
that Hugo is actually a child-fantasy
picture, because it is children who understand this primordial love of cinema,
where anything is possible. Hugo is
the type of film that cinephiles will be remembering for generations to come.
We’ll show our children why we don’t just watch the newest Hollywood products,
but instead delve into the real life documents of cinema verite, the wondrous world of Technicolor, the glamour of
classic Hollywood, and, before all that, the fantastic spectacle of the first
moving pictures.
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