Hugo’s opening goes on for quite a while without giving us any dialogue at all. Most of the first fifteen minutes is just director Martin Scorsese’s camera swooping through the Parisian train station where most of the movie takes place, rocketing us down the long platforms, through the bustling crowds of people, and behind the walls and into the clockworks of the old building where our protagonist Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) lives. It’s pretty much pure visual porn sprinkled with tiny setup moments that give us hints at who the station’s inhabitants are and what their daily routines look like. Scorsese must have been pretty confident that what he created was stunning in order to stick this long with a wordless approach to storytelling. Not giving us any opening narration, action, or dialogue was a huge risk. But Scorsese was right, and it paid off. This world that he has created is so immersive, exploring it is so enthralling, that I could have watched Hugo go about his business wordlessly for quite a while before I got bored. The fairytale version of Paris in winter that this film creates is a world that I want to live in so desperately that I found myself pricing Christmas trips to the city on my way out of the theater. In visuals, setting, and mood, Hugo soars.
It’s the development of the story that thuds. The basic gist of plot is that Hugo was the happy son of a clock builder, and his life was great. His dad was supportive and knowledgable, he taught him everything he knew, and together they were restoring an intricate old clockwork robot called an automaton that he thought was the coolest thing ever. But then his dad dies in a fire and Hugo has to go live in the train station walls where his drunk uncle services the clocks. As drunks are apt to do, Hugo’s uncle disappears, leaving the young kid to fend for himself. As long as he keeps the clocks running, nobody will notice this young boy is living by himself. But not having a guardian means nicking your food from the various food carts in the station, and stealing cogs and gears from the old guy who runs the toy shop. That’s tough to do when the station’s Inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) is always vigilant and loves nothing more than catching wayward children and sending them off to the orphanage.
So far, all of this was working great for me. I was fully involved with Hugo’s life and his day-to-day travails. But when the movie started unraveling its mysteries, things got a little hairy. The big questions of the film are what secrets the automaton holds that will be revealed once it’s operational, what the mysterious past of the toy shop owner (Ben Kingsley) is, and how all of it is connected to a heart shaped key that sits around the neck of Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz), the toy shop owner’s bookish goddaughter and Hugo’s new best friend. The questions were all intriguing, but once I got the answers, I didn’t like them. Hugo’s journey takes him outside the world of the train station, which had been so intricately set up, into researching the history of silent-era Hollywood, which felt at odds with the fairy tale tone of the film’s first half, and eventually derails things to the point that the movie you end with doesn’t remotely resemble the movie you started with. Seeing as I was really invested in what we started with and wasn’t all that interested in what came next, all of these developments were unwelcome. But more on that later.
First let’s start off by talking about what this film is. It’s been marketed as a family film, something kid friendly, and I even get the feeling that its legendary director might think that this is the case. But the further you get into Hugo, the more you realize what you’re watching isn’t a movie for kids at all. This is a movie for adults, perhaps even a movie for the intelligentsia, told using the vocabulary of a family film. This is a movie about artistic expression hidden in the framework of a fairy tale. There might be some surface similarities to Harry Potter that could peak a kid’s interest; Hugo lives hidden in the walls like Harry lived in a cupboard, he becomes friends with a whip-smart young girl in Isabelle, just like Harry did with Hermione. But it won’t take long for kids to figure out that this is no Harry Potter. Hugo is slower paced, it talks about history that would be over most kid’s heads, and there isn’t much broad humor to keep a younger crowd entertained. If you have a particularly intellectual little tyke, then sure, maybe they could fall in love with Hugo; but I wouldn’t recommend it for most.
As far as the performances go, the kids are generally serviceable, and the adults are generally great. Asa Butterfield is slightly hit or miss as Hugo. There are a couple scenes where I thought he really nailed the emotion of what was going on, and a couple where I felt his readings were a little awkward. He very much comes off as a talented kid still finding his way, and at times I thought he was cast just because of his brilliant blue eyes, which tell entire stories on their own. Similarly, Chloë Moretz is blessed with a ridiculously expressive face. It’s a real gift for her as far as acting goes, because all she has to do is contort it a bit and she can project a whole range of emotions within seconds. Generally Moretz is strong here, she spits out Isabelle’s mouthfuls of dialogue very naturally and she is always able to let you know what her character is feeling, but sometimes what she was doing came off as too much performance and not enough naturalism. I could watch her acting when I should have been getting lost in the reality of the moment. Nevertheless, the girl is good and will only get better with further seasoning.
The three supporting roles that stuck out to me the most were Ben Kingsley as the toy maker, Sacha Baron Cohen as the Station Inspector, and Christopher Lee as a wise librarian who often lends Isabelle books. Kingsley starts off playing his character as a bitter old man, and he makes a great villain initially, but there’s always a sadness in his eyes that lets you know he is going to soften over time. Despite the fact that the toy maker is a central figure in the poorly conceived turns the movie takes, Kingsley does a great job crafting the character and allowing you to watch him develop over the course of his journey. Sacha Baron Cohen’s Station Inspector is such a fun villain. He is an exaggerated cartoon in all of the best ways. He feels like a throwback to silent films, with a squeaky, metal knee brace and a loyal hound companion that make him memorable and even almost lovable despite his curmudgeonly villainy. And after he develops an infatuation with a flower stand girl (Emily Mortimer) that leads to awkward attempts at smiling, he becomes downright huggable. How is this possible for a character who locks kids in cages and gleefully sends them off to orphanages? Cohen somehow takes a Dickensian villain and makes him someone you love, through the force of willful charm. Christopher Lee doesn’t get much to do here, but dear me does that man carry weight with him everywhere he goes. All he needs to do is appear on screen and suddenly all of the other actors are trapped in his gravity. His librarian character doesn’t need to say much, doesn’t need to do much; you just know that he has a wealth of stories and wisdom at his disposal. I wish he had an expanded presence, a more important role in the story, but there’s just not enough screen time left after Scorsese takes the movie on its detour in the third act.
Instead of continuing to dance around it, I guess it’s time to address that last act head on. It’s hard to decide how to handle something like this in a review, because you don’t want to give the ending of a movie away, but you also want to properly cover what ends up being the film’s central flaw. I’ll just say that Hugo’s investigation into his mysterious automaton leads him to researching the life of legendary film director Georges Méliès, who is most famous for the 1902 film A Trip to the Moon. What starts off as a fantastical fairy tale suddenly becomes a very realist biopic as Scorsese turns his focus over completely to the life of Méliès. We get lengthy flashbacks dramatizing his life and educating us on his importance to the development of moviemaking. We even watch footage from his films; lots of it, for quite a while. And then, when we get to the end of Méliès’ life and the destruction of his movie studio and most known copies of his films, suddenly Hugo starts to feel like a “very special episode” of a sitcom that wants to preach to us about the importance of film preservation. Drinking all of this in I couldn’t help but feel like I was watching Scorsese get lost too deeply in his own mind and focusing too much on his own obsessions, and it all happens to the detriment of the film. I responded very strongly to a lot of what Hugo had to offer, I was sufficiently swept away by its visuals; but when I walked out of the theater all I could think about was how long it was and how flawed the second half of its script is. That’s a shame for a story that had so much potential.
