Hugo (2011)

2 months ago

LIFE IS BUT A DREAM.

by Chad Perman

I go to the movies because of movies like Hugo. I believe in movies because of movies like Hugo. And not to put too fine a point on it, but this entire site basically exists because of movies like Hugo.

Martin Scorsese’s first truly family friendly film (yes, really; Taxi Driver this ain’t) is a cinematic love letter to those of us who’ve ever been fortunate enough to have been bitten by the film bug. For so many of us, Scorsese included, it happens at a young age and things are never wholly the same. The magic of childhood bumps up against the wonder of a vast screen filled with stories and dreams and something inside of you never recovers, endlessly chases that same high again and again, in theaters and living rooms, through countless bad movies and a handful of treasured ones, from 7 to 97 years old. Movies become a balm, a fix, a cure, an escape. A bright wall in a dark room.

Hugo tells the story of a young Dickensian orphan trying to make his way through the life in early 1930s Paris. His world is large and small all at once: he lives out each day almost entirely within a Parisian train station, where he works to keep the clocks running from inside the clock tower which he calls home, but from his window at night, he can see the whole of Paris.

Left with a drunkard of an uncle after his father’s unfortunate death in a fire, Hugo is sad, lonely, and lost. His dad was his entire world and now that world is gone. The only remnant he’s able to hold onto from his old life is a broken-down automaton that his dad brought home from the museum where he worked shortly before his death, a project the two worked on together, in between reading Jules Verne books, endlessly tinkering to bring the machine back to life.

Now, by day, when he’s not scavenging or stealing food from the shops in the train station to survive on, Hugo is collecting spare tools and parts to continue the work they had begun together. The young boy is convinced that the automaton somehow holds within it a secret message from his father, some kind of clue about how to get through life without him. With each new tinkering, Hugo is getting ever closer to this final connection to his father, but an elusive heart-shaped key remains unfound and, without it, the automaton will never work.

We are guided through this opening act with all the grace and skill of a long-time master craftsman given a brand new tool (3D) with which to build. Scorsese and cinematographer Robert Richardson take full advantage of the medium, with long, sweeping, intricate shots of the bustling and vibrant Paris our hero calls home. We move in and out of spiraling staircases and cavernous towers from a child’s point of view, are fully immersed in the experience of a Parisian train station with its hundreds of passengers and workers, its scattered orphans working to survive and evade the grasp of the Station Inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) and his loyal dog.

You can literally feel Scorsese’s joy and enthusiasm through the lens, as his cameras swoop up, down, and all around the teeming train station and any other world Hugo inhabits. At times it feels almost magical.

And if that were all Hugo was, if that were all this film ever did well - its gorgeous 3D canvases and Oliver Twist-ish first act - it would likely be enough to be declared a great success. But that this opening hour is a mere set-up for the film’s real story, the precursor to a second act filled to the brim with a glorious and glittering celebration of the magic and power of art, the sheer awe and wonder of cinema itself, well, that’s what makes the whole thing feel like such a gift to any true film lover. Hugo turns out to be much, much more than a slice-of-life orphan-makes-good tale. It slowly evolves into a fable, a quest, a mystery, and finally, a heartfelt love letter to the transformative power of the movies.

Hugo finds the heart-shaped key, hung around the necklace of his fellow adventurer and confidante, Isabelle (Chloe Moretz). The automaton works. The two gather around the mechanical being as it slowly beings writing out the message it was programmed to record. But instead of words, it draws a picture. A picture of a rocket crashing into the eye of the Moon. The same image Hugo’s father would tell him about seeing once in a film many years ago. In its final flourishes, the automaton signs the drawing with the name of George Melies.

Melies, one of the pioneers of early cinema, has been long-forgotten and presumed dead by those who thought about him at all. But George Melies is alive, having abandoned cinema after the first World War when he could no longer afford to make pictures, relunctantly forced to sell the only prints of many of his films to a company that melted down the celluloid to make heels for women’s shoes. A much stuffier, stern, and embittered Melies (Ben Kingsley) now works in same the Parisian train station where Hugo runs the clocks. It’s a small world after all.

Scorsese uses Hugo and Isabelle’s quest for more information on George Melies’ career as a way to open up the film itself, allowing Scorsese to create what is, essentially, an inspired tutorial on the early years of film history (including brief scenes from Keaton, Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and more, as well as plenty of moments from Melies’ work). Again, one can sense Scorsese’s well-documented enthusiasm for the medium, as well as his oft-argued plea (barely disguised here) for film archives and preservation. And, for a film geek, it’s manna from heaven: sitting in a darkened theater, watching vintage films flash by on the screen.

When I switched my major to Film Studies shortly before my junior year in college, many around me were perplexed. Why would you want to go and do a thing like that? they’d wonder, plodding diligently away towards their business or science degrees; degrees that made sense, degrees that would “open doors” or, at the very least, provide some sort of career path upon graduation. I didn’t have a simple answer for any of them, least of all my well-meaning but frustrated parents or my supportive but confused girlfriend. I had, instead, a feeling that I felt I had to chase, something stirred up in me by Woody Allen, Ingmar Bergman, Robert Altman, Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese and a hundred other directors. Something that I could no longer ignore. I simply had to face facts: movies were what did it for me. I had been bitten by the film bug and it wasn’t going away. It’s where my heart was.

Try explaining that to any serious, career-minded person.

But now I don’t have to. Now I have Hugo. Now I can say: sit and watch this. This is why I chased movies in college, and why I still chase them today with all the free time I can carve out in my life. This is why I started a film site and pour countless hours into it, writing about and being captivated by movies, even though I have ever dwindling amounts of time in my life and often miss out on much-needed sleep as a result. This is why all of that is worth it, and more than worth it, really. Necessary. Among other things, art makes one feel less lonely. It makes life more worth living.

And so, as Hugo and Isabelle bring George Melies back to life - both as a man and a filmmaker - a huge smile began to form on my face. In heartfelt scenes that easily rival anything out of Cinema Paradiso (that other great love letter to cinema), we watch as Melies and his wife (and long-time co-star) remember and relearn the wonder of the movies. They have found themselves again, and Hugo has found a family.

“Films have the power to capture dreams,” says Melies, as we near the end. Hugo reminded me of my own, and then some.