There's Something About Movies

Rating: 9/10 (21 February 2012)

A simple story, a boy and a girl, both orphans, meet each other and together they try to fix a mysterious automaton. The boy lives alone hidden behind the big watches of a train station in Paris. The girl lives with her godparents, an average old couple, she is a housekeeper and he owns a toy booth at the station. The boy Hugo and the old man George are in permanent conflict, because Hugo is always trying to thieve little pieces from mechanisms in the store, so he could fix the automaton. They actually have an ambiguous relationship, because George also seems to be a little curious about that boy, it seems they have something in common, some affinity or something to share. The antagonism between them is therefore surrounded by a strange affection or even it is a seed of friendship, a fight that could work in benefit of them two, but gradually involves everyone in the movie.
Well, that was just the basic. Things get complicated; everything starts to get tied with each other, forming a mechanism itself, the "big watch". Making this microcosm function perfectly again demands a series of complicated tasks, dealing with relationships, feelings and the rules of the world that sooner or later will imply big changes in the life of each character. But this will only happen if Hugo, Isabelle and George manage to solve their own problems. The automaton remains in the center of the plot all the time. The train station is full of people, it has an intense movement and there is a lot of activities going on, as Scorsese said, everybody is searching for something about their lives.
This movie is so rich of meanings, languages and images; it's like a growing concert, a little bit like Ravel's Bolero, most of the time. I'd dare say that it is not just about the magic of movies - imagination, dream, adventure, magic, drama, entertainment, feelings..., although it's already so much, and it's not limited to the story of these specific characters, and those already work as a big stream of signs and facts being released, but it is kind of a legacy or testimony of Scorsese's career. These three perspectives interact; they work together, one reinforcing the other, all under the director's baton. Scorsese's work is this diverse and wide knowledge about making movies, an experience through decades exploring all kinds of possibilities.
We have then a simple story but an intense dancing of signs, images and languages, through a timeless and endless story, if you wish. It is eventually about movies today also, and not only about the memory of movie making. These eras are all contained in the movie, somehow, but there is an outcome, which is Hugo's Invention. That is a metalanguage, there is a little trick in here, because Hugo didn't actually invent the automaton, he just had it under his care, to try to fix it, he had his reasons. So, if he did invent something in this story, and it is highly suggested that he did, what was it? Hugo invented the story itself, meaning, he produced it, together with the movie makers. The fact is that it's very hard to trace a boundary among the main lines of the plot, because they are all interlaced. Hugo works somewhere in between fiction and reality. That is the magic of the movies, enhanced in this one. But, there would be any place like that in the real world? Yes, of course: the imagination.
This richness of meanings was also present in the book that originated the movie - I saw after writing this review. Brian Selznick, the author of the book, had said before that his work was a combination of medias and languages. Well, but Scorsese did it in the big screen, with amazing results.
The final result is this big interaction that happens when you watch a movie, and the several impacts and consequences that movies really have in our lives. They help us in our searches; help us find a purpose, a place, something to do with our life, to find the happy endings of it, in everything we do. These "external" effects are also present in Hugo.