Video Killed the Radio Star

Rating: Null/10 (7 February 2014)

Martin Scorsese directs "Hugo", a film based on Brian Selznick's "The Invention of Hugo Cabret".
A giant metaphor for Scorsese's love for cinema, "Hugo" stars Asa Butterfield as Hugo, an abandoned kid who discovers that Georges Melies, the famous pioneer and film-maker, is "not really dead". Melies' career, we later learn, was a career of "wonder", "magic" and "enchantment", but one which was nevertheless "killed off" by the "violence" and "realism" of Europe's many protracted wars. Reality and blunt violence, then, supplanted the magic and innocence of Melies, a magic which Hugo symbolically reanimates, thereby resuscitating cinema. For Scorsese, cinema lives, cannot be killed and is periodically reinvigorated by the mix of technical wizardry, nostalgia and youthful longing which Hugo represents. "I'm fixed now!" characters state throughout "Hugo", a nod to a cinema which heals, enchants and fills hearts with love! That a 170 million dollar, CGI suffused, archaically scripted 3D movie directed by a guy who uses violence like piano keys is simultaneously championing the cause of cinematic revolution, film preservation, innocence and the charms of 19th century silent films, is an irony completely lost on Scorsese.
"Hugo" is at its best when it's mapping the nooks and crannies of the giant train station in which Hugo lives. Scorsese also paints a number of nice early 20th century buildings and promenades, though bad CGI lighting, digital matte paintings and excessive green screens occasionally hamper things; the film awkwardly juggles realism and high fantasy, and Scorsese's many CGI assisted long takes are less impressive than he realises. Beyond this the film contains a number of homages to early cinema (Keaton, Chaplin, Lang, the Lumiere Brothers, Renoir's "The Beast" etc), though modern audiences raised on touchpads and Wi-Fi will have no time for this. Nostalgia today goes only as far back as an internet browser refresh tab.
Some have criticised "Hugo's" happy ending, but such an ending is in keeping with the film's resurrection project. Ironically, the real Melies was forced into bankruptcy by the French and American studio systems, forces which pushed him into become a toy salesman in a train station. This is itself the fate of most post-war film-makers, including Scorsese, most eventually warped into unwitting toy pushers.
Everything "Hugo" does, Scorsese would do better with "A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies". Elswhere the film's many shots of kids scampering behind walls and woodwork recalls Hiromasa Yonebayashis superior "Arrietty", whilst its themes and metaphors pale next to the recent "Ratatouille", Brad Bird's kid-friendly examination of art, artists (also hiding behind woodwork) and their social function, good or bad.
Incidentally, love-letters to cinema tend to either celebrate the camaraderie of film-making ("Bowfinger", "Ed Wood", "A Prairie Home Companion", "Limelight"), or critique the tawdriness of the audience's relationship with the screen ("Vertigo", "Rear Window", "Contempt", "Phantom of the Paradise", Cronenberg, Lynch etc). Others ("Cinema Paradiso") celebrate both the screen's powers of illusion and its ability to immortalise precious moments. "Hugo" exists in none of these camps. It's emblematic of a bad romance, big, blunt and intent on bludgeoning its audience into submission.
5/10 – Worth one viewing.