But I will say this much: Great Chaplin's ghost! Hugo sure in a damn fine movie.
Is this the Martin Scorsese we know from Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, The Departed, and Shutter Island? Arguably, no, although the sheer experienced filmcraft on display throughout Hugo is never short of masterly.
Throughout Hugo, we see the love light in Scorsese's eyes, and it's flickering at 24 frames per second.
Even Méliès had his predecessors in the Lumière brothers, and they receive a significant nod as Méliès recounts how he got started in filmmaking during a carnival screening of their "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station." Later, in a montage sequence, we glimpse just enough of several later films to identify them, such as the The Great Train Robbery, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Intolerance, The Thief of Bagdad, Tumbleweeds (William S. Hart's last movie), Keaton's The General, Chaplin's The Kid, and Louise Brooks in Pandora's Box.
I'd love the eventual disc to add a track that annotates Hugo's filmic homages, for they are abundant and pointing them out would create added value illumination. (Hey, if anybody on the production end wants a hand with that, just contact me here, 'kay?)
Plus, Hugo speaks between the frames about the creative process, both explicitly in the film's narrative and implicitly in the way it was made. I can't shake the notion that we're glimpsing Scorsese celebrating the tortuous, thrilling, clockpunky act of movie-making itself, like Chaplin using The Circus as a vehicle to comment about the often precarious art and craft of being funny.
The film aims itself right at my limbic system even in its incidentals. For instance, the whole thing is set in my own mind's-eye image of romanticized Paris at the turn of the 20th, with Django Reinhardt playing his gypsy jazz in a café where James Joyce shares a table with Salvador Dalí. We get those mammoth steam locomotives barreling through Paris' Gare Montparnasse station, so evocative since I was a kid. And suffusing the setting and storytelling — all that brass clockwork, gears within gears; visit my house and you'll see that I have a thing for old clocks.
Hugo is being marketed as a "kids film," and I guess technically it is that. Its screenplay is conventionally structured enough to attract parents looking for nonthreatening mainstream "holiday family film" fare. Sacha Baron Cohen's Inspector Gustav comes within his mustache's width of tipping over into Disney cartoon villain mode before being given some redeeming dimension when it counts.
But it's not only a "kids film." There's plenty on tap for those of us in the higher age brackets, especially those of us whose love of movies encompasses far more than the latest 'splodey summer blockbusters.
And yet I'm so glad it is a "kids film."
For one thing, here's a movie in which the plot, and therefore our two child leads, drives forward with an appreciation not only of movies — but also of books: of reading, of discovering the world and engaging your authentic self via leather-bound covers and the Narnia-like expanses of bookshops and libraries.
Precocious Isabelle (Chloë Moretz) finds joy in trying out new words as she leads Hugo (Asa Butterfield) from his clockwork warren within the Paris train station walls through the looking-glass/wardrobe/pirate ship/TARDIS that is Christopher Lee's (!) bookshop, a storefront cathedral so piled high with shelves and stacked-up volumes that he might be living in an Escher drawing. To Isabelle the shop is "Neverland and Oz and Treasure Island all wrapped into one." The fact that she can also recite Christina Rossetti gets them out of a sticky predicament with Inspector Gustav early on. Give her another 15, 20 years and there's my dream girl. (In fact, she's Elizabeth, so big win there.)
While I'd say that Lee's bibliophile shopkeeper could have used a moment or two of his own for some development, he earns his keep in the film by giving Hugo the talisman he needs right when he needs it most: an edition of Robin Hood that, the man says, is innately meant to be Hugo's. It's a moment that sets in motion Hugo's act of reigniting the storyteller's spark within morose old Méliès.
When they discover the missing clues they need to solve the mystery of the heartbreak embittering Isabelle's "Papa Georges," it happens within a library. There, the adult guide they encounter to get them into Act III isn't a wizard or a talking lion or a pirate. He's a movie buff and, most crucially, an author.
And the "reading is fundamental" angle is not conveyed with a heavy hand. It's naturally integral to the narrative and not slathered on like a dose of "good for you" broccoli on a dish of ice cream.
And when it was all over, they applauded.
So now I'm wondering: Given Hugo's critical and commercial success, and given its likely "long tail" staying power as a Scorsese film, is it possible that we'll now see a generation of kids grow up with more familiarity of silent-era cinema, from Méliès forward, and with a fuller understanding of where the movies they enjoy come from — than any generation since ... well, since ever, even their great- or great-great grandparents who were those first movie audiences?
I'm going to click Publish Post hoping so.
Thanks, Mr. S.
Music: Django Reinhardt
Near at hand: Gifts from London for Judy and Dan
