Like clockwork…
It was the Divine C‘s turn to choose a film and, despite my best efforts to convince her that going to see a 3D family mystery (even if it was directed by Martin Scorsese) might not be best plan, feminine wiles and will won through, and off I dutifully trudged with her to see Hugo (2011). Thankfully, however, I was to be more than pleasantly surprised…
Asa Butterfield plays Hugo Cabret, an orphan who lives above a Paris train station in 1930, which is ruled with an iron fist by Station Inspector Sacha Baron Cohen. Responsible for winding the station’s clocks at the behest of his uncle Claude (Ray Winstone) since the death of his father (Jude Law), Cabret is also a master of automata, and has been working hard to repair a ‘writing robot’ that his father left him. Purloining various toys from a stall-holder on the station, Hugo is caught red-handed by the toy-maker, whom he and we are set to discover is none other than cinematic legend and innovator Georges Méliès (Sir Ben Kingsley). Angry at the boy’s theft, Méliès confiscates Hugo’s notebook, which he finds to be full of intricate, technical drawings concerning the work that Hugo and his father were trying to complete on the robot. In fact, as Hugo is set to discover, the automaton once belonged to Méliès, and Hugo realises that he has been given a chance to give a man his life back…
There is clearly so much more going on here than with normal 3D fare; that is to say, Scorsese is obviously too good a director to waste much time with excessive ‘Oh look, I am pointing something in your face’ techniques. Rather, there is a real exploration of the fabric and texture of the beautiful 3D world that we as viewers are allowed to explore, and the set-pieces emerge as genuinely exciting as a result.
In addition, excellent, dignified performances, particularly from the young leads, gives the film a sincerity that is noticeably lacking in most family cinema and the script by John Logan (Gladiator (2000) and, in late 2012, the new Bond epic Skyfall) from Brian Selznick’s novel, is a joyful and moving evocation of time and place, even if there is the sense that certain characters, such as Christopher Lee’s Monsieur Labisse, are only there as window-dressing; this was likely a flaw in the original text too. It also seemed to both my beloved and myself a strange decision to not even acknowledge that the film’s setting was Paris, France wiz some outragggeous French, euh, accents, euh, but this is perhaps no great loss.
And it is good to see attention being paid to the great magician and innovator that was Georges Méliès – a man to whom this website, along with every film director who followed him, owes an enormous debt. Thankfully, Scorsese’s film provides an entertaining (and overdue) epitaph.
126 mins.