dazzling visuals and a love of cinema overcome the movie's flaws

Rating: 7/10 (27 April 2012)

Melding elements of both Oliver Twist and the Artful Dodger into a single character, Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) is a homeless orphan who lives surreptitiously inside a great train station in Paris circa 1931. To assuage his loneliness and to give some purpose to his life, he fixes and maintains the station's many elaborate time-pieces - and, to survive, he furtively steals food from the local vendors selling their wares there.
A life-affirming departure for the normally dark and brooding Martin Scorsese, "Hugo" is such a beautifully crafted work of commercial cinema that I feel a trifle ungrateful for not actually liking it more - though, more accurately perhaps, I should say that I love the final third of the film but have some reservations about what comes before. It is certainly a wonder to behold in terms of its art direction and scenic design, which together help to create a never-never world of Art Deco architecture and breathtaking cityscapes, where the surreal and the real comfortably meet - a fitting visual correlative, as it turns out, for the theme of the film. And it goes without saying that the movie richly merited each of the many awards it earned for its visual accomplishments.
Adapted by John Logan from the Brian Selznick novel, "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," "Hugo" is at its most magical when it is reveling in and celebrating the pioneer days of filmmaking, particularly the fantastical works of magician and special effects wizard Georges Melies ("A Trip to the Moon"), who is an actual character in the movie (played by Ben Kingsley). It seems, according to the story, that Melies left filmmaking an embittered, forgotten has-been and now owns a toy booth in the very train station that Hugo calls home. One fateful day, Hugo and Melies' paths cross - and so the adventure begins
Given all these quality elements, what then are my objections to the film? Primarily, they rest in the fact that, as a central figure, Hugo is too lacking in fire and passion to generate much interest for the audience; that the secondary characters - particularly Sacha Baron Cohen as a war-ravaged security guard - come across more as live-action cartoon figures than as real people; and that the storytelling and pacing in the first half of the film often lag behind the visual stimulation. All these work as distancing devices that keep us from becoming as fully engaged in the plot and the world of the film as we perhaps would like to - until the last third, that is.
And that final third winds up making all the difference, as it brings together the movie's disparate elements into a unifying theme of fixing that which is broken - be it a mechanical device or the human heart. This theme is reflected in the film's visual motif of endless machines, both those that are functional and those that are in need of repair. And Scorsese's meticulous re-creation of Melies' classic works is indeed a wonder to behold.
There is one glaring anachronism, however: though the story is set in 1931, Hugo at one point makes reference to having seen Errol Flynn in "Robin Hood," a movie that wasn't released until 1938! A prescient kid, that Hugo.