Dazzling not-kiddie fare from Scorsese makes great use of 3D for once

Rating: 9/10 (6 February 2012)

This imaginative movie about movies is charming, sentimental, and quaint. It is not really for kids (they'll get bored by the plot), although it sustains a level of wonder and joy you don't expect from a Martin Scorsese film. Hugo will rekindle a love for the movies for some and open up an entirely new universe to others. Hugo (Asa Butterfield) is an orphan who lives in a train station, making sure the giant clocks all run on time. He's been deserted by his soused uncle (Ray Winstone), and his parents are long gone. Hugo is alone with his clock machinery and some various doodads from his father, including an old automaton that had been programmed to write and draw. The automaton requires a special key to be activated, and once Hugo locates said key, the real mystery, involving the proverbial wheels within wheels, just like clockwork, is afoot.
As an orphan, Hugo must steal food in order to live. He also takes tools so he can work on the automaton, and he's caught by a toymaker named Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley). Méliès has a granddaughter, played by Chloe Grace Moretz, who takes pity on the poor Hugo and helps him in his quest to solve the riddle of the automaton. When Isabelle and Hugo finally do get the automaton working, they find their plans shifting from a connection between the automaton and Hugo's late father and to the previous owner of the automaton, who identity shall remain a mystery here.
I'm not a paid reviewer, so I figure it's okay if I take the cheap route and offer up a bad pun. The movie is timely. More than 100 years have passed since the invention of motion pictures, and there are so many people who have no idea what those early films were like. Scorsese, a longtime movie historian, knows all too well his audience, and he gradually allows them to assimilate within the friendly confines of a boy-with-a-mysterious-past story before inviting them into the early world of movies.
This is a 3D movie, by the way, and it's the rarest of birds – the kind in which the 3D doesn't attack you like you owe it even more money but rather the kind you don't notice until you need to notice it. Scorsese, ever the perfectionist, uses the medium to its utmost, with a terrific sense of when to hold back and when to hold forth. Not bad at all for his first foray into the new hip way of shooting movies. So, for me, the 3D version of this film is definitely worthwhile.
By the final 20 minutes or so of the movie, I was absolutely entranced by what had by then become an homage to older films, to the very dawn of cinema. Scorsese takes great pains to show how difficult it was for fledgling filmmakers to make a movie look so easy. No special effects, no budget, handmade costumes – it was like working with a small grammar school. At one point we are shown an early reel, from the nineteen- aughts, and it's in color. A character explains that although the movie was shot in black and white, the crew painstakingly hand-colored various scenes to add a touch of tint. It's a beautiful detail that I assume is true, as Scorsese, in the framework of a lost-child plot, seeks to educate those of us who are not film historians.
And by the end of the movie, the wonderful, poignant performances by Kingsley, Butterfield, Moretz, and Helen McCrory dissolved my senses. There are several touching moments in the waning minutes of the film, and the cast hits all of the right notes. Hugo would serve as a poetic coda if this were the end of the great director's career, but even so it's a love note to the world of movies, translated for a wide, new audience.