Lacked precisely what it was paying tribute to

Rating: 7/10 (17 January 2012)

Maybe I got fooled by the ratings and the film's place in IMDb Top 250, but no matter what, I never miss a Scorsese film and I was really eager to discover "Hugo".
Scorsese is one of the most defining and consistent filmmakers of his generation but he is also one of these privileged filmmakers so adored that no matter what they do, it's always 'gold' for the fans, Quentin Tarantino is another blatant example... Whenever I read a review of a Scorsese film by Roger Ebert, probably his fan number one, it's a sort of admiration that almost confines to fetishism, with always the same stuff written in different formulas. Scorsese as –I paraphrase- 'the tormented genius with the greatest talent to depict sinning hearts in quest for redemption', this is so overused that it deliberately neglects the fact that many filmmakers explored these themes lately even better than him, Abel Ferrara, to name one.
Now to "Hugo", which is not a 'bad movie'; in fact, it's even far from being a bad movie ... but when you read all the ecstatic reviews, they all make it sound as if the non-fans didn't get it was a tribute to Silent films. We all got that it's a film that reminds us of the most glorious days of filmmaking, the Golden Age of creativity, with a bonus from Ebert: it's also the expression of Scorsese's own existential grieves through the portrayal of George Meliès. The problem with these reviews is that they focus on many elements of 'greatness' forgetting that, as I often say, their combination doesn't make a movie necessarily great. When you take "Hugo" as a whole, I don't know, but you realize that many parts indeed drag too long, that the pacing is slow and not 'Kubrick' slow, it's slow as we're always ahead of the characters, especially the two kids.
Indeed, we know that it's only a matter of time since the boy and the girl would get together and try to solve the mystery, so all we have to do is wait for the script to cement their complicity in the most believable way, and when it finally happens, you think 'it was about time', no pun intended. There are some parts where the dialog sounded forced and stereotypical to a degree that even Spielberg wouldn't have dared to reach, the boy who lost her father, the girl whose parents are dead, loneliness, sadness  granted that being an orphan makes a kid more interesting story-wise but why drowning this in an ocean of pathos? The movie overuses depth as the convenient excuse for slow pacing like the epic "Benjamin Button" bore did, and sometimes, I really waited for something to happen, and it has nothing to do with violence, explosion, 'kiss kiss' or 'bang, bang'  just some action, drama, and I'm not counting the subplot with the buffoonish police officer (Sacha Baron Cohen) and his dog, probably the most embarrassing moments of the film.
Anyway, it took time for the plot to take off and it became more interesting when the movie revealed what it wanted to be: a homage to cinema and Silent classics, and I reckon the story of George Meliès was very poignant and Kingsley is extremely convincing as the grumpy old guy. But seriously, what's that ever got to do with the beginning? The movie started like a Family Adventure film and ended as a tribute to an artist who simply needed to know that he wasn't forgotten. I'm sorry but as much as I appreciate the fact that younger audience should know more about Meliès, this is still adult material, the whole existential aspect contradicts the initial tone of the film. The film tries to be so many things, "Harry Potter" and "Amelie Poulain" with the slapstick of a Disney film but at the end, it just feels like an assemblage of parallel stories (the policeman with the girl, the automaton, the librarian ) with unequally satisfying conclusions for each of them.
Talking of the policeman, the script tries to fill the gaps by adding peripheral characters like him -after all, movies like this need a villain- but the other characters are so one-dimensional and sterile that it made the whole thing look artificial. Take simply the way the extras walk, it's all mechanical, they see a kid running and carrying a weird automaton, and they don't even pay attention, they're just here to recreate a crowd and bump on Hugo or the girl when they're running. The film and its recreation of a 30's Paris is visually dazzling but it had something very lifeless as if the population was made of automatons. And if it wasn't for the beautiful score, some scenes would have been quite dull because the kids' dialogs really felt written, especially Chloe Moretz' line (too mature, even from a girl who loves to read). There's something cruelly lacking in the film, I guess it's simply called entertainment. The film lacked precisely what it was paying a tribute to: this zaniness, flamboyance, creativity of early cinema, it lacked the very spirit of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, and even the cheers at the end had some very dark and depressing undertones.
There were two movies making tribute to Silent films in 2011, "The Artist" and "Hugo", I thought "The Artist" was great precisely because it managed to tell an endearing romance with the homage aspect as an implicit back-story. Although "Hugo" has an interesting pedagogic value, there's a feeling of underachievement from the adventure aspect. Spielberg's "Tintin" didn't have much depth, but I had a better time watching it.
I respect Scorsese for exploring other themes and cinematic techniques, but I think the movie is a little bit over-praised and just because Scorsese made it -again- that doesn't prevent from pointing out some weaknesses.