Movie Review: "Hugo" - Scorcese'S Loving Tribute To Early French Cinema

‘HUGO’ is a master work from Martin Scorsese, who has won acclaim for films like “Raging Bull” and “The Departed”. It’s about an orphan boy but it’s not really a movie just for kids as it pays tribute to one of the pioneers in cinema, Georges Melies. Based on the 2007 illustrated historical fiction, “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” by Brain Selznick, it’s set in the early 30s and happens mostly in the Montparnasse train station in Paris. The opening sequence alone introducing the station and with the camera following the main character, Hugo (Asa Butterfield), rushing down halls and staircases is already worth the price of admission. You’d wonder how they executed this one long “tuhog” shot. Hugo is good in tinkering with machines, something he inherited from his dad (Jude Law) who died in a fire. He now lives alone in the clock tower of the train station, winding its huge clock that’s the job of an uncle (Ray Winstone), the official timekeeper who suddenly went missing. He subsists by stealing bread or fruit from passing vendors. He has a special project, repairing a robot (they call it an automaton) left behind by his father. For this, he steals gears and other stuff from a cranky old man who owns a shop inside the train station (Ben Kingsley) who is hostile to him.

The old man turns out to be Georges Melies, one of the fathers of French cinema whose works were thought to be extinct. Hugo befriends Georges’ goddaughter, Isabelle (Chloe Moretz of “Kick Ass”, “Let Me In”), who helps him rebuild the automaton with a special heart-shaped key that she keeps. Hugo has a foil, the Station Inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), who wants to arrest him and send him to an orphanage. Beautifully designed, Scorsese created a beautiful vision of Paris making it a real City of Lights as romantics around the world described it to be between the two world wars. Hugo's world inside the ceilings and catwalks of the train station seems isolated and lonely but it gives him the chance to view everything happening in the station without being noticed. Scorsese pays tribute to early French cinema, like “Arrival of a Train at the Station” by the Lumiere brothers. Melies is a master of the silent era and he made more than 530 films before the First World War erupted in 1914. The war affected him and his movie business so he was forced to sell it. He considers himself a failure. One of his films, “A Trip to the Moon” (1902) survived and one of his ardent fans manage to research and restore copies of about 80 other films, enough to pay Melies a tribute and insure his place in the history of cinema.

Asa Butterfield “(The Boy in the Striped Pajamas”) is perfectly winsome and endearing as Hugo. He’s superbly supported by Kingsley as the aging Melies, Moretz as his chief ally, Helen McCrory as Melies' wife who starred in his past films, Baron Cohen as the villainous station master, and Christopher Lee in a short role as a kind bookshop owner.