Scorsese's clever but sycophantic tribute to early film pioneer submerged by tangential, plodding children's narrative

Rating: 4/10 (24 March 2012)

For those who believe that 'Hugo' is all about the title character, think again. Martin Scorsese only uses a fanciful child's tale to arrive at his true intent: a tribute to film pioneer, Georges Méliès. Visually, one can argue that the film is a tour de force, with some fantastic special effects as well as a sumptuous score, but until we arrive at said tribute, Scorsese's tale lacks the requisite tension and charm.
The film starts off rather nicely as Scorsese takes us into the heart of a Paris train station, circa 1930. We meet Hugo, an orphan, who's being raised by his alcoholic uncle, after Hugo's watchmaker father is killed in a fire. The uncle teaches Hugo how to maintain the vast array of clocks, hidden inside the station but their relationship remains completely underdeveloped. The real tension is supposed to be between Hugo and the autocratic station inspector (awkwardly played by Sacha Baron Cohen), who is bent on sending the orphan away to a reform school. Scorsese relies on a series of slapstick chase scenes between Hugo and the inspector to move the plot along, and adults should not find much interest in such shenanigans.
The connection between Hugo and Méliès is made through a keepsake bequeathed to Hugo from his father. It's an 'automaton', a mechanical man which the father could not get to work, and now Hugo has taken to stealing mechanical parts from a toy store owned by Méliès, now a virtual recluse, in the hope that those parts will enable him to start the device up. Méliès ends up confiscating Hugo's notebook, which contains drawings of the Automaton and his efforts to repair it. Eventually, Méliès hires Hugo to work in the toy store, in order to pay off the debt for the mechanical parts he stole from the store.
Hugo finally gets the Automaton to operate when he discovers that Méliès' goddaughter, Isabelle, is wearing the key (that starts the device), around her neck. Wouldn't you know it but the Automaton draws a screen shot from Méliès' most famous film, 'A Trip to the Moon', proving that the "great man" is still alive (unbeknownst to an indifferent public). The two kids manage (with the help of a kindly film historian), to bring Méliès back into the public eye, and Méliès ends up getting the recognition he "deserves", from the French film society.
In the best part of the film, Scorsese shines, as he offers up a film hagiography of Méliès' career. The flashback, which includes how Méliès actually created 'A Trip to the Moon', features that glass house, where the pioneer's seminal feature film, was made. Nonetheless, one gets the feeling that Scorsese's embrace of the past, has gone too far. The reverence for Méliès has gotten to the point where Scorsese has placed the film pioneer, on a saintly pedestal. Yes, he is an important figure in the history of cinema and he was extremely talented, especially in a day when film was in its infancy and no one had yet grasped the concept of film as spectacle —but Méliès was still a product of his time, and those ancient images belong in the context of the times they were made in. If it was up to Scorsese, Méliès would be placed in the same pantheon as Shakespeare and Dickens; but Méliès' films were not designed to appeal to the intellect. Méliès' appeal to Scorsese is on the technical level and that's why he admires him so much. To a certain extent, there's nothing wrong in that. But for Scorsese to expect the average film goer to worship Méliès as some kind of film 'deity', I would suggest he's gone a little too far out on a limb.
Karina Longworth, in her review of 'Hugo' in the Village Voice, sums it up best by arguing that the 'ticking clocks' are the true antagonist in the film: "In the story of Méliès's life as recounted by Scorsese—and by extension, the story of the movies—time is the enemy that alters the tastes of audiences, decays film prints, and turns today's fetish objects into tomorrow's relics."
'Hugo' in many ways, feels more like a documentary in parts than a clever children's story, fraught with conflict. The conflict here is manufactured and the two child actors end up with little to do except act as impresarios for the Méliès main act. Relationships here are never really developed or explored and we're asked by Scorsese, to simply applaud the hagiography. If you were to take out all the spoken dialogue in the film and leave only the musical soundtrack, you wouldn't miss much. Perhaps, ironically, that's what Scorsese was really aiming for: a stunning visual tribute, to the technical wizardry of an early film pioneer.