Uneven, but still has enough to admire.

Rating: 4/10 (17 February 2012)

Martin Scorsese crafts a charming love letter to the movies, but unfortunately Hugo has much more on it's mind that just that. At first, this appears to be a relatively simple tale of a young boy named Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) trying to finish the work of his father. It's got a lot of the standard pieces that one would expect from such a tale, like the spunky girl he befriends (Chloe Moretz) and the cartoonish villain trying to lock him away (Sacha Baron Cohen). As a narrative, it wasn't doing much for me, but the astonishing technical achievements within the film made it at least appealing to the senses. So while I wasn't compelled by the story, I was at least able to marvel at the visuals of the film and the remarkable sound design.
The stages are exquisite, with some of the most impressive art direction and costume design I've seen from this year, and Scorsese manages to create a fully realized environment here. Hugo lives in a train station, a place of constant activity and daily routines, and Scorsese orchestrates it in such a lively fashion. We are focused on this young boy, but you can always feel a thousand different things happening around him, people walking past and going about their own day. I just wish our focal point had been remotely interesting, which it wasn't for me. I credit a large part of this to the cast, which is primarily lackluster to say the least.
Scoresese isn't able to pull a worthwhile performance out of either of his young stars; Asa Butterfield tries to be very grown up and ends up looking like an untalented child poorly playing pretend, while Chloe Moretz is supposed to be very bright and childlike, but is instead dreadfully rigid and wooden. The worst offender though is Sacha Baron Cohen, and it's the attention given to his character that provides for the most glaring flaw in the film at large. This utterly absurd and cartoonish characters doesn't at all belong within this world and Cohen's embarrassingly hammy portrayal is a real stain on the picture.
Thankfully though the film is quite uneven overall, which means that there is a lot to be admired. The focus isn't precise at all, but when attention shifts to Georges Melies (Ben Kingsley), the film shines bright. In focusing on this man, Scorsese constructs his love letter to cinema and you can certainly feel his own passion pouring off of the screen within these scenes. Helped by the vivid and emotional performance from Kingsley, this aspect of the film is so very alive and beautiful. Combined with those gorgeous technical qualities and some wonderfully edited sequences (such as the depicting the beginnings of cinema), it's almost like a wonderful dream.
Living in the 21st century, I never really think about a time where movies didn't exist, let alone when they weren't relatively available at every corner. Scorsese is able to detail not only his own passion for the cinema, but make the audience understand just how appreciative they should be that it exists in the first place, because there was a time not so long ago when it didn't at all. I just wish that the entire film had been as grand, because everything else certainly didn't come close to the note it built around to. There isn't a proper, organic flow towards this aspect of the film, but I'm still thankful that it went there because it's certainly a step up from the rest of what was going on.