Scorsese's Love Letter

Rating: 6/10 (8 December 2011)

Martin Scorsese has never, and will never, make a bad film. The worst you could say of his filmography is that some are masterpieces while the rest are merely satisfactory. Having said that, 'Hugo', his first foray into the world of three dimensions, is nothing we haven't seen before by any lesser director.
It's being put about that 'Hugo' is some kind of magical adventure story, full of intrigue and excitement, perfect for children over the festive period. It isn't. It's not even a kids' film. It's actually Scorsese's love letter to film and nothing more. The things we have come to the maestro with – film preservation, explicating the possibility of cinema – are so embedded in the story that anything Hugo and co. say or do is rendered irrelevant. Film itself becomes the adventure.
Using Brian Selznick's story, 'The Invention of Hugo Cabret', Scorsese presents us with a character – the famed Georges Méliès, pioneer of early cinema, maker of more than five hundred shorts – who could easily be Scorsese himself.
Selznick's story is about an orphaned boy named Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), who is made to work in a Parisian train station after his clockmaker father (Jude Law) dies in a fire. Hugo's drunkard uncle (Ray Winstone), the station's clock operator, becomes his guardian. The uncle goes off to drink while Hugo stays in the walls of the station, clandestinely keeping the clocks working.
Hugo's father died unable to finish fixing an automaton. Completing this project becomes Hugo's mission. In the film, as in the book and in real life, Méliès (Ben Kingsley) lives the last part of his life bitter and depressed as a toy merchant in the train station. His path crosses Hugo's and the two establish themselves as mutual foes. Hugo finds a friend (his only) in Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz), goddaughter to Méliès. The two of them set about completing the automaton, to find out what secrets it may hold. Without revealing the plot, the automaton is the thing which brings us back to Méliès.
Although the story is set in Paris (we know this because we see the Eiffel tower every time we're outside), we hear only English voices. Some of the supporting actors seem nothing more than set decoration; I'm not sure why they're there. There's the standard of computer graphics we've come to expect, but youngsters will want more than aerial images of an apocryphal Paris. (I would have asked a youngster what they thought, but everyone in the audience, without exception, was an adult.)
You shouldn't be too tough on kids; they've got adulthood for criticism, but Butterfield is not up to the task of leading a Scorsese picture. The same goes for Moretz (who was terrific in 'Let Me In'). Sacha Baron Cohen is inconsistently funny as the merciless train station inspector hell-bent on capturing and sending Hugo to an orphanage. You can't blame the man. He's created some of the funniest characters of all time, so it's only downhill from now on, I'm afraid. The only sequences which are interesting, if not special, are the montage sequences of film footage from days gone by.
Scorsese isn't just good for giving us gangster flicks; of course he's not. He made 'The King of Comedy', 'Taxi Driver', and 'The Last Temptation of Christ'. Not one of them featured a single Italian (except De Niro), let alone a mobster. All I'm saying is there's a reason why we all want to him to keep it gangster.
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