Reel Look: Hugo

Rating: 7/10 (15 July 2015)

"Maybe that's why a broken machine always makes me a little sad, because it isn't able to do what it was meant to do... Maybe it's the same with people. If you lose your purpose... it's like you're broken." Based off of Brian Selznick's 2007 novel 'The Invention of Hugo Cabret', 'Hugo' is a historical adventure drama directed by Martin Scorsese (his first shot in 3D) and adapted for the screen by John Logan. The seasoned filmmaker and cinephile remarked: "I found 3D to be really interesting, because the actors were more upfront emotionally. Their slightest move, their slightest intention is picked up much more precisely." Known for his mobster movies about gang violence and organized crime, Scorsese wanted to make a film that his twelve-year-old daughter could watch. Released in 2011 an grossing $185 million at box office, the film won five Oscars, more than any other picture that year in 2011. Did he succeed in possibly making his first family film? Let's take a look.
The setting is the Parisian Gare Montparnasse train station in 1931. Orphaned and alone twelve-year-old Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) lives a secret life behind the station's hidden chambers and passageways, maintaining the clocks and avoiding the vindictive Station Inspector Gustave (Sacha Baron Cohen) and his Doberman Maximilian. Before the station, Hugo lived with his widowed but kind and devoted master clockmaker father (Jude Law) of whom took Hugo to see the films of George Méliès only on his birthday. When an unexplained museum fire breaks out, killing the father, Hugo's inebriated uncle takes the boy with him to live at the station working the clocks, of where he has been ever since. Hugo works ambitiously on his father's most devoted project: a broken automaton (a mechanical man) that can illustrate, holding an ink pen in it's right hand of which might give him a message from his father. From the journal he has kept of his deceased parent, he secretly steals parts from an embittered toy shop owner's stand, Papa George, (Ben Kingsley) to fix it. He eventually gains the trust and assistance of his bookish and well-spoken goddaughter Isabelle (Chloë-Grace Moretz) to join him on an adventure in, like the clocks and the automaton, slowly fixing the lives of those around him by his loving ambition and caring demeanor towards the microcosm that is the station in which he lives for the better. He soon discovers the biggest secret from whom Papa George once was many years ago via the automaton before he dismissed his passion and broke down into a cantankerous cogless codger. Like the world itself, it is its own myriad of mechanisms that all mesh into each other as one, thus proving everything and everyone must have a purpose somewhere and aren't just an extra part.
Filled with mystery, dreams, fantasy and sleight of hand, this is a film anyone should see with a sense of adventure and/or a passion for cinema and how this intriguing realm unfolded. 'Hugo' is Scorsese's personal love letter to motion pictures and cinema itself, showing us every now and then clips of the birth of cinema (the last scene of an outlaw shooting point- blank from 'The Great Train Robbery', the majestic sets of Babylon from 'Intolerance', Buster Keaton sitting on the wheels of a moving train in 'The Gerneral', etc.) and how it has truly changed our world and enlighten the senses even to today. It gave us a chance to think, to become creative with new and invigorating ideas in how to tell a story with memorable characters and exotic lands. It showed us that we can be more than ourselves in reaching out to someone in who may just need fixing of their own only to discover something more than we could ever have possibly imagined. 'Hugo' entrances and and stirs the imagination with its warm atmosphere and colorful world in which in creates for the viewer. For the movie makers and those of whom enjoy films, 'Hugo' is truly a perfect opens secret passageways of its own, turning the mechanisms and gears in the viewer's minds to unleash the power within to create and inspire.