Clockworks, or the invention of dreams among clocks

Rating: Null/10 (22 February 2012)

Consider a movie about a mechanical man who draws a picture from inner heart, once unlocked with the right key.
Consider this picture one of many unlocked from a box and fluttering around in a room. Motion pictures that guide vision.
And consider a boy - adept at fixing things - who will have to quite literally discern the mechanisms that shape pictures into a narrative and that time beats at the heart of them. And all of this as our movie about the invention of dreams.
And before we're lost in the gaudy swirl of impossible dreams, visions, movies, daredevil escapades, misty-eyed wonders, sweeping CGI vistas, nostalgic lushness, sparkling metallic gadgetry, and earthly artificiality of 1930's Paris, consider the simplest premise: a movie about an old man who even unbeknownst to him has devised the mechanics that will generate a narrative that restores dreams and hope. This is a remarkable idea in how it has been visualized by referencing cinema, one that at least in my eyes vindicates Scorsese's several missteps as of late.
Oh, it is a little heavy-handed at times. A little heavy with emotion. And a little unimaginative when you'd expect it to, notably the climax on the clock. But it's an erudite work of someone who's been building clocks all his life, has mastered the art in his own way big or small, and now wants to tell you about the function of time.
Now the first generation of filmmakers were actual inventors, engineers, optical scientists. Quickly it passed into the hands of artisans usually from less than respectable art: vaudeville, the circus, popular theater, the magic show. What joyrides we've had since. A more important function as it turned out, was that images drawn from thin air into a film strip had the capacity to mend and purify in novel ways. The only thing asked from us, was that we shed self and be a part of them for how long it took.
Scorsese's wonderful trick is that instead of giving us fantasy that ordinarily affects with smoke and mirrors, he makes the actual plot of the film about what it means to stage the trick. This way we get to note how the thing tics, the actual function. What the mirror mirrors. In our case, several iconic images of early cinema.
So, our film is about this man who first engineered illusions, contraptions for dreaming. One of these is a mechanical man, stored away and forgotten. Years later, father and son dust it out from an attic broken and work hard to decipher its mechanism. Father dies and kid goes to move inside a giant clock hovering above a train station, where tracks of life disperse the narratives. His own is an adventure that sets in motion the wheels and chains of the world in such a way as to redeem the old inventor and fix, restore the purpose of dreaming. This is given to us as the actual restoration of his films and playing before an audience, a clever wink.
To think that in many quarters this has been received at face value, as a movie about kids, or as just a love letter! It boggles the mind with how little delicacy some people handle films. The famous Lumiere short about a train arriving at station is enacted at one point, and as a dream (within a dream). What better clue did they need?