Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Hugo (2011)

Hugo (Asa Butterfield) and Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz)
in Martin Scorsese's masterful valentine to the movies.
From some of its opening shots—in which the camera looms sky high over the sprawling streets of a picturesque downtown Paris in the 1930s, swooping down into a railway and roaring like a jetliner through the terminal, picking up speed until people and objects are reduced to a dizzying blur—Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo” looks every bit a polished example of modern entertainment, complete with all the digital tricks and technical flourishes.

And it is. But the movie, a masterpiece that examines the very history of movies, is all that and a great deal more.

Desperate to solve the puzzle of his late father’s prized automaton—a small, robot-like device with an innocent, child-like countenance—shy wiz-kid Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), embarks on an exciting journey that takes him out of his secret home in the giant clock tower of a Parisian train station and back, metaphorically, to the birth of the movies. He’s joined by Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz), a bright, insatiably curious bookworm with an appetite for adventure as well as clues to the mystery. Pursuing them is a clumsy inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen, very funny) with a squeaky, metal leg brace and a growling, obsequious dog.

Restoring the damaged automaton to working condition, Hugo and Isabelle watch the gleaming mechanical man draw a picture of rocket crashing into the moon. The illustration— inspired by an iconic image in the landmark 1902 silent film, “A Trip to the Moon”—is meaningful to both characters. For Hugo, it reminds him of the first picture his father took him to see; and for Isabelle, it’s an insight into the background of her godfather, the influential director Georges Melies (Ben Kingsley, marvelously compelling as usual), who now runs a modest toy shop at the train station and never talks about the movies.

“Hugo” is rapturous in visual beauty, like a magical fantasy, but also has moments that recall haunting reality. Unlike the clocks in Hugo’s majestic tower—a vast network of whirring gears, springs and levers—the specter of World War II is a grim recurring motif, leaving some characters physically and emotionally wounded. For Melies, whose films lost their audience after the war, it marked the end of a career, leaving him feeling worn-out and broken. With Hugo’s help, the aging filmmaker discovers that his art still resonates.

Big in budget and slickness yet small and personal at its heart, Scorsese has created a profoundly moving love letter to some of the earliest filmmakers of the silent era. Not only a tribute to Melies, “Hugo” pays subtle homage to the Lumiere brothers, Auguste and Louis, credited with making some of the earliest films ever in the 1890s; and a cheerful nod is given to Harold Lloyed, first when Hugo and Isabelle cast themselves up at a screening of “Safety Last,” and again later when the young hero duplicates the silent comedian’s famous scene dangling from the hand of a huge, outdoor clock.

Also figuring in the exposition is Melies’ history as a magician and the way he later carefully mingled the two mediums in his visually inventive, surreal movies. Like Melies, Scorsese has always been a highly personal filmmaker. With the immensely memorable “Hugo”—a richly literate mix of old and new and a visually splendid piece of work—he has engineered one of the all-time great magic tricks of cinema.

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