Magical!

Rating: 10/10 (28 December 2011)

"Hugo" is director Martin Scorsese's foray into family film and 3D film both at once, but it is also his most direct ode to the history of cinema, the medium that creates the stuff of dreams. We meet young Hugo Cabret (the amazing Asa Butterfield), an orphan of perhaps 10 or 12 years who is living by himself behind the walls and in the clockwork of the great Montparnasse train station in Paris in the early 1930s. His father (Jude Law, shown in flashbacks) was a clock-maker, operated a shop and also worked in a museum, but when he is killed by a fire in the museum, Uncle Claude (Ray Winstone), the unkempt drunk who keeps the clocks in the train station running, takes Hugo in and teaches him the trade, only to disappear soon after. So Hugo is on his own, relying on his wits and quick manoeuvres in the busy train station to keep out of the hands of the Station Inspector (the very funny and also terrifically poignant Sasha Baron Cohen); he keeps the clocks working, so that nobody knows that Uncle Claude is gone, and in his spare time he works at repairing an old automaton that his father had rescued from obscurity in the museum before his death. The automaton, when working properly, can actually write on its own! But Hugo can't quite get the repairs done because there's an odd heart-shaped keyhole in the back of the machine for which the only key must also be heart-shaped, and he has no such key. He steals little clockwork springs and other devices from the station's toy shop, run by Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley), but one day he is caught by Georges and forced to give up the notebook of his father, which held countless drawings to help him repair the automaton; without it he is lost. Fortunately, Georges has a god-daughter, Isabelle (the marvelous Chloe Grace Moretz), who befriends Hugo and helps him reconcile with Georges and, in time, repair the machine. But that's only the beginning of the story....
This is truly a magical movie, and the 3D aspect of it is, for once, an integral part of the magic. Scorsese of course knows his stuff, and he never overplays the 3D effects or jars you with them, they just add depth to what's already an entrancing landscape. Although ostensibly about Hugo's search for a new home, the film is really about one of the very early pioneers of film, Georges Melies, who was working I believe starting around the 1890s and who suddenly stopped working in film after the First World War. One of my current favourite actors, Michael Stuhlbarg (you loved him in the Coen Brothers' "A Serious Man," or perhaps still adore him in "Boardwalk Empire"), has an amazing turn as a film historian, Rene Tabard, who tells Hugo and Isabelle about this great director, almost all of whose films are apparently lost. You may have seen Melies' "A Trip to the Moon" film, if you've ever seen early cinema - Melies was to early film what Tolkein was to fantasy literature, in the sense that when other early experimenters in film were bringing real life to the reels in cinema houses, Melies brought fantastical stories to the screen, as far as I know the first to do so. "Hugo" is really his story, and as it happens, the story of Georges Melies as told in "Hugo" is actually what really happened to the man.
Along with everybody else I've mentioned, there are also lovely moments from some other favourite actors: Christopher Lee is just perfect as the train station's bookseller, Monsieur Labisse (and one thing I love about his small role is that when he addresses someone using the French titles and last names, his pronunciation is such that you know he speaks the language in real life, which is not necessarily true of the other actors in this film, great as they are); Emily Mortimer is both wistful and strong as Lisette, the flower seller whom the Station Inspector secretly loves; Frances de la Tour and Richard Griffiths are coffee-shop habitués and dachshund lovers who eventually get together; and Helen McCrory is quite luminous as Mama Jeanne, Papa Georges' wife. The cinematography is brilliant, the dialogue is completely real, and the entire film is utterly magical. And we even get a Scorsese cameo! Even if you don't think you like "family" films or "children's" movies, or especially if you don't like 3D (I generally don't), do yourself a tremendous favour and go to see this movie, yes in 3D if possible. It will easily become one of those beloved seasonal films (even though it's not set at any particular time except winter), and although I'm sure I'm going to love it again and again on BluRay at home in years to come, I am most happy to have seen it, first, as it was meant to be seen - on a large screen in a cinema, in 3D. I'm not sure that it's possible to recommend it more highly; I *am* sure that it's my favourite film of 2011.