A solid addition to the oeuvre of a genius.

Rating: 7/10 (1 October 2014)

Everything, and everyone, has a purpose. Martin Scorsese has spent decades further establishing his purpose, which is to create glorious cinema. He has been infatuated with it for his entire life, and 2011's Hugo is his love letter to the craft in its early ages. Simultaneously, it is somewhat of a fairy tale catering primarily to children - a genre in which the legendary director is well, not exactly known for.
The setting is magical 1930s Paris. A young orphan, Hugo (Asa Butterfield) fixes clocks and such gadgets in a train station, where he also lives. His one goal is to find the missing heart-shaped key that was meant for a mechanical man his father once built. When he meets a shopkeeper with a secret, Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley), and his adventurous young daughter, Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz), he may just be able to achieve this goal.
It isn't a particularly compelling story, but when you put a master behind it, you're bound to get something of worth. The film excels in technical departments. With Robert Richardson's seamless cinematography (paired with some CGI) and Thelma Schoonmaker's sharp editing skills, the final product is a wonder to look at. However, the central material at hand is so different from the kind of subject matter Scorsese got into the business for in the first place that the magic he is able to exude from a piece of work is often lost here. He does maintain his signature style, but it isn't quite enough to allow this film to rise into sensational territory for its majority.
But Hugo does provide an inner layer within all of this that does hint at much more. When older-era films become a significant plot point, Scorsese is able to explore the stuff that he truly loves. Not only do these sequences shine over everything else in the film, but they also give off the impression that they are the sole reason Scorsese was interested in making this film at all. Through montages including one that explains the background of Kingsley's character, the core of the film is brought to light and emulated beautifully, sure to please any true fan of the art form. Kingsley gives the best performance in the film by far as a broken man who has lost his strongest passion.
While the film is enjoyable overall, with a lot to admire in the technique, there are only sparks of greatness to be found that nail the higher notes Scorsese is capable of hitting. With hardly adequate child performances and a clumsy Sacha Baron Cohen character thrown into the mix, Hugo is for the most part a rather mild and lesser effort amongst such an amazing filmography. At the end of the film, the cinematic homage storyline is wrapped up in a mesmerizing way, with a potentially unforgettable closing line and a sequence that capsulizes the magic of the medium that Scorsese has conveyed in the past. Then he adds one more scene to close the main storyline involving the children. It is a much less remarkable climax, lacking the grandness of what came before it. Scorsese shoots it in one of his classic long continuous shots, but there isn't a whole lot beyond his technical artistry. Having said that, Hugo is quite a good film with some fantastic individual scenes, and while it may be closer to the bottom tier of the man's work, that is by no means a bad thing considering his brilliance.