Hugo

Based on a novel by Brian Selznick, Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s first foray into the world of children’s film is an incredibly visual exploration of human emotion and early filmmaking. The cinematography is stunning and liberal use of 3D effects, which runs the risk of feeling overwhelming and unnecessary, only adds to the fairy tale quality of the film. Full of captivating displays of complex clockwork and a few truly breathtaking shots of the train station, Hugo takes the audience into a child’s fantasy world of intrigue and adventure.

The film introduces us to a young orphan, Hugo (Asa Butterfield), who lives in the walls of a train station in 1930s Paris. When he’s not evading capture by the Station Inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), Hugo operates the station clocks and works on fixing an automaton his father (Jude Law) was trying to rebuild before he died. In the station, Hugo encounters a variety of people, including Isabelle, a girl his own age with a passion for storybook adventure, and Georges Méliès, a stern toymaker with a mysterious connection to Hugo’s automaton.

Over the course of the film the automaton, with its mournful features and delightfully intricate clockwork inner-workings, becomes a symbol for the many themes the film attempts to address: family and loneliness, legacies and the past, and the concept that humans, like machines, have purpose and can be broken and fixed. The theme of humans being “broken” is none so subtly emphasized throughout the film. From the Station Inspector’s injured leg to Georges Méliès’ tortured past, the film explores breakdown both physical and emotional and the overlap between the two. Inevitably, the War, with its impact on life, entertainment, culture and mentality, is an oft mentioned cause of destruction, a grim element in a largely whimsical story.

The two child actors, Asa Butterfield and Chloe Grace Moretz, are charming and adorable, delivering their lines confidently if not always convincingly. They are supported by a solid cast including Sacha Baron Cohen, Ben Kingsley, Helen McCrory and Christopher Lee. Refreshingly absent are the atrocious attempts at accents that so often permeate films set in foreign countries. Apart from Sacha Baron Cohen, most of the actors appear to use their own accents and the film is in no way diminished by placing a largely English cast in a Parisian setting.

Hugo manages to capture some of the whimsy characteristic of French film-making. In a style reminiscent of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie, we are given glimpses of the intersecting lives of various fairly ordinary people, their small triumphs and failures providing a backdrop to the main action. There is occasionally a sense of disconnect between these simple observations of humanity and the heightened emotion and intrigue of rest of the film as if Scorsese couldn’t quite decide what sort of film he was making. Hugo is at once the story of an orphan finding a place in the world, a study of human emotion and the effects of war, and an homage to early filmmaking. While from time to time it appears that Scorsese may have drawn together too many elements, he does an admirable job balancing them and the result is a visually and emotionally engaging children’s film.

Hugo is screening at York's Reel Cinema. For more information, click here:[1]

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