A Strange Review: Hugo

If you read the entertainment press at all, you’ll have noticed all the four- and five-star reviews and raves of Masterpiece! that Martin Scorsese’s latest, Hugo, has received. That the director best known for Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and Goodfellas was straying into Steven Spielberg/George Lucas territory was seen as a category mistake by some. Nevertheless, if the critics are right, Scorsese’s having temporarily abandoned the world of secret societies, strange codes of conduct, and loyalty above all has proved an eye-popping, impressive, and altogether successful venture.

But is the film really as good as the press?

Yes.

Hugo Cabret is a little boy who lives in a Parisian train station. Having lost his beloved father, a fixer, a mechanic, in an accident, he is taken in by a drunk of an uncle whose job it is to wind all the clocks in the station. When the uncle takes off one day, Hugo continues winding the clocks lest someone notice that he is all alone  and – off to the orphanage for him.

When he isn’t dodging the station guard, played with an almost Germanic rigidity by Sasha Baron Cohen, he’s pilfering food and, more important, spare mechanical parts from vendors in the station. One such vendor, a seller of toys, catches him in the act, and forces him to empty his pockets. Along with the gears and springs and screws Hugo has accumulated is a notebook filled with sketches of what looks like a robot. The toy seller, Monsieur Georges (played by the pitch-perfect Ben Kingsley), is horrified by the book and snatches it away, refusing to return it, despite the boy’s tearful entreaties.

That notebook holds the key to the one thing Hugo has left from his late father – an automaton, found in a museum, but that is in a poor state of repair. Hugo is determined to fix the broken machine and see whether it holds some hidden message from his father – and some clue as to his own destiny.

It most certainly does, especially when it is learned that the surly toy seller is none other than the great French film magician George Melies, fallen on hard times, and that the notebook was originally his. After the First World War destroyed his career, such that hundreds of his “sci-fi” and fantasy films were destroyed or lost, Melies is reduced to selling trinkets and trying to forget his true vocation, lost forever.

But both Hugo and Melies were brought together for a reason: both will ensure that past tragedies are redeemed and that the future still holds surprises and hope – the hope of realizing one’s true calling despite all the obstacles a cruel world throws in one’s way.

Scorsese moves his characters through the train station and each other’s lives with such dexterity and death-defying grace as to render you speechless at times. Moving, fun, and wise, Hugo will give you both a catch in your throat and much to think about. As Hugo ponders the meaning of the mechanical man he has been left by his father, he comes to see that machines work because each and every part, no matter how small, no matter how insignificant, has a role to play in the larger scheme of things. Everything, in other words, has a purpose. Including the little orphan boy Hugo.

Sounds inspiring enough, until you contemplate the consequences for a bit. Doesn’t this reduce us all to mere cogs in a great machine? Doesn’t this risk viewing humanity as a grove of  clockwork oranges, with some parts damaged beyond repair, to be thrown on an overly efficient society’s junk heap, and others to be “fixed” in such a way that they become not their true selves but merely gears in the works of the rich and powerful?

While the film does not, Western Union–like, state it in so many words, certainly the implicit message is that such a fear, which literally haunts Hugo as a nightmare, can be assuaged by how we dream. Our imagination is what raises us above the mere machinery of the Industrial Age. Our ability to envision worlds yet to come, that may never come, at least in this life, so enlarges our perspective that we can never be merely useful. The dreamers are what keep us from being crushed by technology, even as that technology magnifies our capacity to realize and share those dreams.

Why hasn’t Hugo done better at the box office? Because it’s a kids’ film for adults. What kid has a love of the old – old movies, old books, old tales of adventure and daring do. Not the telling of the tales – but the mere remembering of the tales, and the world in which they were first conjured.

It’s also a film about the “magic” of the mechanical, the makeshift, and the gear-laden. The 1920s saw machines beginning to dominate industry, manufacturing – newfangled automobiles and automation and auto-everthing would at the close of another war see even more home-spun dreariness evaporate with the click of a switch. Yes, there was a time when one could still marvel at the possibilities.

Now we take this all for granted. What is there for kids to truly stare wide-eyed at anymore? With videogames and iPods and digital this and 3D that, any six-year-old can download an app or piece of software and zoink! — the miraculous right before his or her already bored eyes! The only advance is how quickly you can pull the rabbit out of your high-def hat.

To remember a time of such innocence, for lack of a better word, or perhaps the quotidian, when a wind-up toy, a mechanical man, and the movies as movies could still beguile is not for kids of 10 or 14. You’d have to at least remember buying records and videotape players and roll-up windows in cars. And what a big deal Star Wars and the first Superman were – You’ll believe a man can fly! Sheesh, today, you’d better make me believe I can fly.

So with or without the kids, run and see Hugo today. I’m hoping word of mouth will keep this in theaters long enough to see a decent return on investment. I see no real advantage of the 3D version over the 2D, by the way. As far as I’m concerned, if I was already convinced that 3D is a waste of money and Tylenol, Hugo did nothing to dissuade me. Talk about gilding the lily. The “magic” of 3D is a bit of a cheat and adds nothing to what the story – and the stories within the stories, those of Melies, and Harold Lloyd, and Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton, and all the great innovators and early artists of the silent-film era – already provides. 3D can never replicate the feeling those first movie audiences had when it looked like a train driving into a station was going to burst through the screen and plow right into them! We’re too jaundiced for that. Hugo is best experienced by way of God’s greatest special effect: the unaided human eye, and of course, imagination.