Hugo (2011)

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.

Chad Perman is a writer living in Seattle, and the editor-in-chief of this site. He can find magic in most any film, if he looks closely enough.

Oscar Week: Avatar

KIND OF BLUE

by Chad Perman

When a film is billed, long before it’s own release, as something that will change the face of movies forever, well, it’s bound to come up a bit short. Which is not to say that James Cameron’s forever-in-the-making Avatar isn’t any good - it’s actually quite good - but only to say that the hype surrounding it actually hurts it as much as it helps. On its own, it’s insanely impressive - filled to the brim with things you’ve never seen before. But as a game changer, it doesn’t quite fit the bill. Which, again, isn’t the film’s fault.

One gets the feeling that, should they ever meet, James Cameron and Wes Anderson would get on rather famously. Which is not to say that their individual sensibilities are anything even remote alike - in fact, they’re about as far apart as one can imagine on an American Filmmaker scale - but rather to point out that both of them are rather insanely obsessive about creating worlds unlike any you’ve really seen before, and getting all the details exactly right. (Which begs the question: what would happen if some studio gave Wes Anderson $300 million to play with?). Cameron is basically a dumbed-down Wes Anderson for the Masses, endlessly tinkering with the smallest of details to get things exactly how he wants them, imbuing nearly every frame with his own sensibility, and trusting entirely in his own vision. In addition, both of them tend to write the type of dialogue you never actually hear in real life - though, to be fair, that’s because Anderson’s is usually highly stylized and instantly memorable, while Cameron can’t write a human sentence to save his life (which is why we are left with lines such as “You’re not the only one with a gun, bitch” and “Everything is backwards now, like out there is the true world and in here is the dream”).

And now that I’m reading over those opening paragraphs, it strikes me as rather odd that I’m being so negative about a movie I actually liked, as if I’m feeling this need to preemptively attack it before you can make fun of me for enjoying something that is so clearly designed to do nothing but entertain and awe me. It seems worth noting that Cameron has done this to me before - I’m looking at you, Titanic - and it’s interesting to notice one part of myself (the part that fancies himself a serious film lover) wrestle with the part of me that is eleven years old inside and just wants his socks knocked off and maybe some popcorn, too.

In the end, it’s rather useless to try and resist Avatar. It will quite simply overpower any defenses you bring to the theater with you, overwhelm any intellectual criticisms you lob its way. Because the fact of the matter is this: you have not seen anything like this, ever. The world Cameron creates for your eyes is every bit as impressive as his dialogue and characters are lazy and predictable, and somehow, that’s enough. When your mind is being blown, it can be hard for your brain to catch up. So while I sit here now, typing these words, I’ve had time to think about it and analyze it and grapple with it and have problems with it, but when I was actually watching it I was enthralled, grinning, and enormously entertained. I can’t speak as to which reaction is the more valid one, but I can say that there is such a thing as thinking too much, and I’m often guilty of it, and if any movie can get me to forget about that, even for a few hours, then it’s something worth noting.

Avatar’s story is not a particularly new one, though that doesn’t make it any less tragic. It is, essentially, the story of what we did to the Native Americans a few hundred years ago, sprinkled with a few overt, heavy-handed references to our current wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s about the way we see what we want and then we try to figure out a way to take it, at first by friendly overtures and diplomatic gestures, and at last by big huge fucking bombs. But it’s also about the ways in which we so often misunderstand other cultures, and how the bull in a china shop approach to occupation and/or colonization is so dreadfully wrongheaded, and how it undermines its own chance at success by its very nature. Bombs will never, ever, win hearts and minds. And arrogant aggression isn’t enough to make a people give up everything they have ever known.

It’s 2154 and a team of Americans is on a mission to Pandora - a moon of the Alpha Centauri star - to obtain some unobtainium (no, really, that’s what it’s called). This rock/mineral is the potential answer to Earth’s profound energy crisis, and needs to be mined as soon as possible. However, the Na’vi people - a primarily peaceful, earnestly tree-hugging tribe of tall, blueish creatures - make their homes right on top of the largest deposits of unobtainium on the entire planet, and have no desire to move. Not because they care a whit about the unobtainium, but rather because this is, and has long been, their home.

To complicate things even more, the air on Pandora is toxic to humans. So, an avatar program has been developed by scientists over many years, in which native Na’vi bodies are literally created and grown in the lab, a mixture of both human DNA and Pandoran DNA. Once the avatars are fully grown, human “drivers” are connected to them, and these hybrid beings are then let outside of the ship, in order to try and integrate with the native Na’vi. The ostensible goal of the project is to find out what it is the Na’vi want, what’s important to them, what would get them to relocate without the need for war or hostile takeover. Or, as one of the characters puts it: “More carrot, less stick”. But this is America, Bush II style, and we all know the stick is coming.

Paraplegic former Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington - who, one thinks, had to work much less hard to be an utterly flat actor than poor old Leonardo did in Titanic) finds his way into all of this by proxy. Literally. His twin brother, one of the lead scientists behind the avatar program, died tragically and, in a last-ditch effort to get at least some use out of the avatar he left behind (avatars tending to be massively expensive, for obvious reasons), a decision is made to use Jake in his brother’s place, as his DNA provides a close enough match for the avatar to ‘work’. Despite no scientific background or any mission training for the project, Jake still jumps at the the opportunity, out of a mix of fraternal loyalty, curiosity, and (one would imagine) the chance to feel what it’s like to have legs again.

James Cameron is contractually obliged to have at least one scene in every one of his movies that looks like this.

Sully, like many Cameron sci-fi heroes, is stubborn and defiant, a loose canon set adrift on a well-planned mission. And thus, the mission changes around him. He almost immediately runs off and, through a combination of army skills and pure good luck, ends up surviving (barely) the night jungle of Pandora, being rescued at the last possible minute by Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), a Na’vi native who sees in Jake “a strong heart” (because you are never allowed to forget that James Cameron is writing the dialogue).

Soon, Sully is taken in by the Na’vi, and Neytiri in particular, who is ordered by the Na’vi leaders to show him the ways of the people. Sully and Neytiri spend the next hour or so of the movie showing off all the things James Cameron has learned how to do with digital imagery, special effects, and all the other tricks in his fully-loaded bag. If it sounds like I’m complaining, I’m not: it’s the most astounding part of the film - a virtual tour of the Eden-like Pandora, a place full of fascinating flauna and flora, intriguing creatures, gorgeous mountains and beautiful oceans. Cameron the director immerses you fully in all of this, artfully conjuring up an entire world for his audience to get lost in, populating each shot, each frame really, with a specificity of detail so convincing and tangible that you almost forget it doesn’t really exist.

Sadly, the final third Avatar is mostly all about the payoff: the explosions, the fighting, the battles. I fully concede that this kind of thing really does it for a lot of people, but I’m simply not one of them: I get bored beyond all belief during extended fight/battle/action scenes. As far as that kind of thing goes, though, it still manages to be technically impressive, if not nearly as interesting as the first two hours of the film. It seems far more difficult to create an entire world onscreen - one that no one has ever seen - than it does to partially destroy it. Blowing things up, even in digital 3-D and whatnot, still looks an awful lot like, well, stuff blowing up.

In the end, though, Avatar emerges as a truly interesting - and often exhilarating - experience. Cameron has figured out a brand new way to tell a tale as old as time, dressing up the oldest of stories in the newest of clothes. Somehow, he manages to create a film that has something in it for both hippie and redneck (I use those terms lovingly, I promise you), a left-leaning, peace-loving, Green film in which a whole lot of stuff done gets blowed up real good. He creates a new cinematic language but doesn’t overwhelm the audience with it, using all of his shiny new tools/toys in service of telling a story, rather than the other way around. And, if the dialogue and some of the stock characters (not to mention alien/avatar sexy time!) leave plenty to be desired, the visual effects and actual movement of the story rarely, if ever, do. It doesn’t change the medium forever, but it does manage to raise the bar quite a bit.

Chad P. is a writer living in Seattle. He maybe cried at Titanic, but probably didn’t, and isn’t telling you any way because it’s none of your business.