Picturesque but surprisingly dreary

Rating: 4/10 (23 November 2011)

Something unfortunate happens when directors decide to celebrate their love of the cinema. They end up celebrating themselves and their own fannish sensibilities, and their movies turn all mawkish. That's what happened in Truffaut's smug DAY FOR NIGHT and Tornatore's treacly CINEMA PARADISO, and it's what happens here. Ostensibly an expression of Scorsese's infatuation with film, it's really an example of his self-infatuation.
HUGO is undeniably beautiful to look at, with sumptuous atmospheric sets and elaborate shots from high overhead or down long corridors -- trust me, miles and miles of corridors -- expressly designed to make maximum use the 3-D camera. But the story itself is glum and painfully slow. Around me audience members kept yawning, and they stirred restlessly in their seats whenever a character launched into another interminable nostalgic reminiscence. (I felt especially sorry for the kids, for whom the film had to be a letdown.) Too many scenes are as earnest and didactic as a museum lecture on the early history of cinema.
Although HUGO's got a splendid cast, the characters struck me as formulaic and lifeless; it's like watching one of those motion-capture Bob Zemeckis movies, such as THE POLAR EXPRESS or A Christmas CAROL, populated by figures not entirely human who resemble animated Chris Van Allsburg illustrations. (The film's very distinctive look is in fact pure Van Allsburg -- a mixed blessing. Everything we see is gorgeous, but it all looks fake, like the expensive film set it is. Eventually the artificiality grows tiresome.)
I've always loved Georges Melies's wonderful silent fantasies, and it's commendable that Scorsese is reminding modern audiences, via this movie, just how inventive, magical, and ahead-of-their-time they were. But somehow the sheer self-congratulatory reverence that Scorsese lavishes on those old films made me long for a simple unpretentious documentary.