Hugo (2011)

Directed by: Martin Scorsese | 126 minutes | family | Actors: Asa Butterfield, Chloe Moretz, Emily Mortimer, Jude Law, Helen McCrory, Christopher Lee, Sacha Baron Cohen, Ben Kingsley, Ray Winstone, Richard Griffiths, Frances de la Tour, Michael Stuhlbarg, Edmund Kingsley, Angus Barnett, Catherine Balavage, Mihai Arsene, Max Wrottesley, Ben Addis, Shaun Aylward, Eric Moreau

Parents with children need not be concerned. Yes, Martin Scorsese, the director of ‘Hugo’, is also the legendary filmmaker behind violent, paranoid and dejected movie classics like ‘Goodfellas’, ‘Casino’ and ‘Taxi Driver’, but you can take your kids to this latest film without any problem. from his hand. What’s called: ‘Hugo’ is a family film with a capital F, a whirlwind boys’ book that is topped with a rather sweet Disney sauce. In other words, it is a perfect film for the Christmas period. In the United States, it was already running around the holidays at the end of 2011, but remarkably enough, it only appears in the Netherlands in the following February, a few weeks before the Spring Break.

For a change, Scorsese doesn’t give the lead role to Leonardo DiCaprio, who has been his regular protagonist for years. That was a bit difficult in this book adaptation, in which the title character Hugo Cabret is a twelve-year-old boy; that role went to Asa Butterfield (“The Boy in the Striped Pajamas”). Hugo is an orphaned child who is so neglected by his guardian, an alcoholic uncle, that he has to take over his job as a clock winder at a Paris train station – we write the year 1931, when it still had to be done by hand. Fortunately, Hugo is enterprising, curious and technical enough to be able to handle this job on his own. He does scrape together his food at the station.

That doesn’t go smoothly, and pretty soon he has some big angry adults against him. The first, toy seller Georges (Ben Kingsley), still has some leniency for the boy, but the local gendarme (Sasha Baron Cohen) is a lot less interested in orphans. Either way, both gentlemen work against Hugo in his grand ambition, which is to perfect the automaton (a wondrous, primitive kind of anthropomorphic robot) that his late father was repairing. The only person who is somewhat in favor of Hugo is Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz), an adventurous girl of the same age who wears baguettes and berets a lot, so that we don’t forget that we are in Paris. She introduces him to the wonderful world of literature.

Scorsese visibly identifies with his protagonist. The director himself used to be a shy, asthmatic lad who spent his entire childhood in movie theaters; the curious, huge blue eyes with which Hugo sees the world are a clear echo of the admiration with which Scorsese must have looked at the fantasy worlds on the silver screen in his early years. And yes, Hugo soon turns out to be a great film lover, who has finally found an ally in Isabelle after the death of his father. But then the biggest monkey has yet to come out of the sleeve. For those who like to keep it a surprise what that is, stop reading now; since this reveal is already done halfway through and it is next to impossible to say anything meaningful about the rest of the film without making this mention, this review will no longer be about it.

*SPOILERS*

Papa George of the toy stall is none other than George Méliès, the greatest pioneer of the early days of cinema, more than a century ago. In 1931 nothing of his fame is left, and he is only a bitter old man. Until one discovers which great, revolutionary filmmaker one is facing, of course. From the moment Méliès’ identity is revealed, the film focuses more and more on his person and (especially) his work, until ‘Hugo’ has finally become a glorified biopic of the old film pioneer. Fortunately, this is a beautiful element in the film, where Scorsese’s film love splashes off the screen and you sit admiring Méliès’ antique innovations. You get the idea that Scorsese’s main aim was to pay tribute to the early days of cinema.

This also makes the choice for 3D appropriate. A parallel is clearly drawn between the innovative nature of Méliès more than a century ago and the three-dimensional aspect of ‘Hugo’ as a modern counterpart. More importantly, Scorsese is visibly enjoying this new form of film, with some dizzying tracking shots darting through the busy station and between the immense gears of her clock tower. As proved several times in 2011 (with Spielberg’s ‘The Adventures of Tintin’ and with Wim Wenders’ ‘Pina’), Martin Scorsese also makes it clear that 3D film in the hands of a virtuoso director certainly has added value.

‘Hugo’ has a tendency to get very gooey at times: Dickensian sentimental at the right moments, but at times the film seems a bit too much of a cola commercial from the Christmas period. Some elements of the story also seem very unbelievable, such as the fact that the boy Hugo can manage all the clocks of a Paris station on his own for ages unnoticed. Nevertheless, the film is above all a sincere and infectious ode to cinema and its innovative power and catalyst of fantasy, which will delight both cinephiles and their offspring.