too much, yet not enough

Rating: Null/10 (24 April 2012)

Hugo is an odd hybrid of children's fantasy and adult drama set in Paris around 1930 and based, like so many movies nowadays, on a comic book (or "illustrated novel" in this case). Half of it is about the title character, Hugo Cabret, a mechanically gifted boy living and working cockroach-like behind the walls of a grand train station where he maintains the clocks, having been trained in that skill by his alcoholic uncle who adopted him after his father died in a fire. The other half is a fictionalized treatment of the life of pioneering filmmaker Georges Melies who spent most of his later years in relative obscurity and poverty. The two stories are brought together by the device of a broken automaton, along the lines of the "Maria" robot in Fritz Lang's "Metropolis," left to Hugo by his father. In his spare time, Hugo meticulously repairs this machine which is designed to write on paper with a pen but the heart-shaped key that activates it is missing and Hugo can never learn what the automaton can write until he can find the key, which, as we learn through various plot meanderings, is owned by the goddaughter of old Melies, who operates a toy concession in the train station and has kept his former fame a secret from the lass. Not only is she unaware that her godfather is one of the inventors of motion pictures, she has never even seen one in her life. It is young Hugo who takes her to the cinema for the first time. And what is playing? Harold Lloyd's "Safety Last," with the famous hanging-from-the-clock sequence.
The title character states that the world is a vast machine and because machines have no unnecessary parts, each person in the world has a purpose in the way that each part of a machine has a purpose. Director Martin Scorsese's way of bringing this notion to life is labor intensive, to say the least, obsessed with busy-ness and maze-like detail. The frames are filled with crowds of people bustling about in all directions; behind the walls of the train station where Hugo lives and works is a network of winding corridors and staircases leading to a succession of rooms populated by turning gears of all sizes. The actors (including Ben Kingsley as Melies, Asa Butterfield in the title role and Jude Law as his father) are adequate but essentially serve as support for the environment, a digital paean to the mechanical age.
Along the way we are treated to a brilliantly surprising dream-within-a dream sequence and interesting reenactments of how Melies created short films in his glass-enclosed studio. The camera-work is sometimes breathtaking and the replication of Paris circa 1930, although artificial in a CGI way, is nonetheless impressive. We do get a sense of the deep sadness felt by an artist who was forced by changing socio-economic conditions and public tastes to abandon his main passion. But overall there are not enough compelling moments to justify the expense and effort of creating the vast, clicking, ticking infrastructure that houses them.