Good but It Should Have Been Great

Rating: 6/10 (8 December 2011)

I am astonished at the praise this film is receiving. While I am very pleased that this is bringing much needed attention to the Great George Melies and his oeuvre, I wonder if I saw the same film others seem to have.
Yes, the film employs the best use of 3D to date though I wish there had been more scenes relating to Melies' cinematic work. The problems with this film is that the story takes forever to unfold and then really goes nowhere. Every moment that should have been heart tugging was really quite void of emotional buildup and anti-climatic.
I appreciate the fact that this is an ode not only to Melies, but to early cinema and all its wondrous melodramatic story lines. The poor orphaned boy. The bitter old man who finally opens up his heart and home. The villain who could ruin everything for the boy. All this and more are situations that should cause anticipation, longing, and hope in an audience but due to Scorsese's mechanical approach to these plot elements they are rendered emptily. Perhaps I expected too much. A story about George Melies. The Great Martin Scorsese who not only is a gifted auteur but a great cinephile whose childhood imagination must have been rife with vivid cinematic inspirations. It truly is not a classic but a grand footnote to what cinema once was and still should be.
The acting is quite uneven. The gifted Sacha Baron Cohen is off key throughout. Ben Kingsley is a great actor but somehow is not convincing as Melies. Perhaps this is due to the fact that these characters really belong in a silent film from decades past, acted by those used to methods employed due to the constraints of early filmmaking. As we venture more rapidly into our future, we seem to be continually trying to hold on to the past more and more rather than finding new frontiers to explore.