A beautifully crafted movie at all levels

Rating: 9/10 (10 December 2011)

Hugo is an orphan who has found an unlikely survival niche for himself hiding behind the walls and in the remote passageways of a Parisian train station. He is barely safe and functional by himself, surreptitiously servicing the station's clocks, work he inherited from his father. Great cogs spin at different angles, symbolic of the churning forces he must negotiate, always threatening to snag him and pull him into their teeth.
He is cut off from others, watching the happenings of the rest of society through peep holes and darting out to grab leftover food and steal machine parts. The walls of the train station are essentially the walls of his personality -- there to keep others at bay. He trusts nobody; he is cut off from others. In a memorable scene where he takes a first tenuous step toward connecting to somebody, he articulates his loneliness to a girl who has taken an interest in him. Can he find a normal childhood, a childhood with parental figures that love him and care for him? He has become a feral child, a lonely child, a child who has just barely survived the double punch of losing first his mother and then his father and now scrounges out an existence cut off from others.
The station master (Sascha Baron Cohen), who seems to have lost his heart as well as the functionality of his left leg in the Great War, is determined to catch him and turn him over to an orphanage. The station master, with a hatchet sharp face and with the aid of a very pointy-nosed Dobermann (both enhanced with 3-D), is a menacing, but also ridiculous presence, determined to make the train station a place where people come to get on trains and a place where people get off. There is no room in his world for society's cast-offs and he careens through the crowded station determined to catch Hugo. The station master was an orphan himself (he has absorbed some brutal punches in his life as well), and his efforts to run a tight station have a frantic quality to them, as though he is trying to chase away the memories of his own childhood. The rules he enforces are there to hold at bay the fears he felt when he was in Hugo's shoes.
Hugo's father (Jude Law), a mechanically gifted man, would make metallic gizmos and would involve Hugo in this, father-son bonding projects. They had rescued an animatronic in disrepair at a a museum and were in the process of restoring it, when his father dies. If working, it will write, and Hugo believes, after his father is gone, that what the animatronic writes will give him a message from his lost father. When he finally restores the animatronic, it does not write at all, but instead draws a picture of a rocket ship plowing into the right eye of the man in the moon. Hugo recognizes this as an image from a movie his father would describe to him. Father and son had also shared movies together, both fully appreciative of movies' importance.
Ben Kingsley plays the role of a bitter curio shop owner in the train station, after previously being the director of numerous early movies. With WWI the importance of his movies has faded and his mini-masterpieces of the time have often been melted down to make high heels for women's shoes. It is like Bach's sheet music for his three missing Masses being used by the local butcher to wrap legs of lamb. Kingsley is intrigued by Hugo but the child's presence also stirs memories and feelings too difficult for him to handle, and he treats Hugo cruelly. Scorsese here is firmly in the tradition of Lucas -- the story told from the child's point of view and he is in a Dickensian world -- adults have forgotten what it is like to be a child and are subsequently cut off from part of their humanity. Adults have been hurt so often that empathy has been all but stomped out of them.
As Hugo gradually comes out from behind his walls, encouraged along the way by the god-daughter of Kingsley, Kingsley also lets go of some of his bitterness. This is helped by a renaissance of appreciation from others for his role in the infancy of movie making. Eventually Hugo has found another family.
The movie is a meditation on the role of movies, and in a larger sense the role of art, in our society. There are clocks everywhere, one with a great swinging pendulum from the tower of the train station, and the passage of time is a repeated motif. If we can keep movies and other art from physically disintegrating, the clock can stop ticking for them.
The 3-D is effective. The opening scene has snow flakes that seem to fall right on the heads of the audience. My five year old grandson, who watched the movie with me (and liked it), reached his hands up to grab a snow flake. In that action he paralleled the audience who saw the first movie ever made: a train pulling into a train station. The audience tried to jump out of the way, thinking they would be run over. Later in the film the train does run through the train station, people jumping out of the way in front of it -- but this turns out to be a fragment of Hugo's dream. Scorsese examines the connection between reality, movies, and dreams. The spinning cogs behind the walls of the train station are a reminder that there is a lot churning behind the surface.