Hugo (2011)

This review includes full spoilers. Proceed accordingly. For other movie reviews from me, click HERE:

Dusty: [pointing at DustyReviews.com] If you’ve ever wondered where your dreams come from, you look around… this is where they’re made. Please like and subscribe.

Rating: PG
Director: Martin Scorsese
Writer: John Logan, Brian Selznick
Stars: Ben Kingsley, Sascha Baron Cohen, Asa Butterfield, Chloë Grace Moretz, Ray Winstone
Release Date: November 23, 2011
Run time: 2 hours, 6 minutes

THE PLOT:

via wiki:

In 1931 Paris, 12-year-old Hugo Cabret lives with his widowed father, a clockmaker who works at a museum. Hugo’s father finds a broken automaton – a mechanical man created to write with a pen. He and Hugo try to repair it, documenting their work in a notebook. When his father dies in a fire, Hugo goes to live with his father’s alcoholic brother, Uncle Claude, who maintains the clocks at Gare Montparnasse railway station. When Claude goes missing, Hugo continues maintaining the clocks, fearing that the Station Inspector named Gustave Dasté will send him away if Claude’s absence is discovered. Hugo attempts to repair the automaton with stolen parts, believing it contains a message from his father, but the machine requires a heart-shaped key.

Hugo is caught stealing parts from a toy store, and the owner, Georges, takes his notebook, threatening to destroy it. Georges’ goddaughter Isabelle suggests that Hugo confront Georges and demand it back. Georges proposes that Hugo work at his toy store as recompense, and after some time he might return the notebook. Hugo accepts and commences work, in addition to his job maintaining the clocks. Isabelle and Hugo become fast friends, and Hugo is astonished to see she wears a heart-shaped key, given to her by Georges. Hugo shows her the automaton, which they activate with the key. It draws a scene from the 1902 film A Trip to the Moon, once described to Hugo by his father. Isabelle identifies the drawing’s signature as that of “Georges Méliès” – her godfather. She sneaks Hugo into her home, where they find a hidden cache of drawings, but they are discovered by Georges.

Several days later, at the Film Academy Library, Hugo and Isabelle find a book about the history of cinema that praises Méliès’ contributions. They meet the book’s author, René Tabard, a film expert who is surprised to hear Méliès is alive, as he disappeared after World War I along with the copies of his films. Excited at the chance to meet Méliès again, René agrees to meet Isabelle and Hugo at Georges’ home to show his copy of A Trip to the Moon.

Finding the heart-shaped key on the station railway tracks, Hugo drops down to the track to retrieve it, and is run over by an out-of-control train that smashes through the station. He wakes up from the nightmare, but hears an ominous ticking emanating from himself, and discovers he has been turned into the automaton. Hugo wakes up again: it was only another nightmare.

At Georges’ home, his wife Jeanne allows them in after René recognises her as Jeanne d’Alcy, an actress in many of Méliès’ films. They play the film, waking Georges, who is finally convinced to cherish his accomplishments rather than regret his lost dreams. Georges recounts that, as a stage magician, he was fascinated by motion pictures and used film to create imaginative works through his Star Film Company. Forced into bankruptcy after the war, he closed his studio and sold his films. He laments that even an automaton he built and donated to a museum was lost; Hugo realizes it is the one he has repaired.

Hugo races to the station to retrieve the automaton but is caught by Dasté, who has learned of Claude’s death. Dasté threatens to take Hugo to the orphanage. Hugo runs away and manages to evade Dasté by hiding on the outer face of the clock tower, precariously balancing hundreds of feet above the ground. After climbing back down, Hugo races to escape the station but drops the automaton on the tracks. He jumps down to retrieve it and is almost run over by a train, but Dasté saves him and the automaton. Georges arrives and tells Dasté, “This boy belongs to me.”

Sometime later, Georges is named a professor at the Film Academy, and is paid tribute through a showcase of his films recovered by René. Hugo and his new family celebrate at the apartment, and Isabelle begins to write down Hugo’s own story.

MY REVIEW:

Hugo is an excellent and multi-faceted film. On one level, this is the child-friendly story of a French orphan endeavoring to find purpose and maintain freedom from orphanage life after his father’s death. On another level, this is the story of director Martin Scorcese’s childhood. And on yet another level, Hugo is a love letter to the history of film and one of its earliest pioneers

To really understand Hugo, you need to understand a lot of the film’s historical backdrop. (via wiki) 

The backstory and primary features of Georges Méliès‘ life as depicted in the film are largely accurate: He became interested in film after seeing a demonstration of the Lumière brothers‘ camera; he was a magician and toymaker; he experimented with automata; he owned a theatre (Théâtre Robert-Houdin); he was forced into bankruptcy; his film stock was reportedly melted down for its celluloid; he became a toy salesman at the Montparnasse station, and he was eventually awarded the Légion d’honneur medal after a period of terrible neglect. Many of the early silent films shown in the movie are Méliès’ actual works, such as Le voyage dans la lune (1902). However, the film does not mention Méliès’ two children, his brother Gaston (who worked with Méliès during his film-making career), or his first wife Eugénie, who was married to Méliès during the time he made films (and who died in 1913). The film shows Méliès married to Jeanne d’Alcy during their filmmaking period, when in reality they did not marry until 1925.

The automaton’s design was inspired by the Maillardet’s automaton made by the Swiss watchmaker Henri Maillardet, which Selznick had seen in the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia,^[19] as well as the Jaquet-Droz automaton “the writer”.^[20] A portion of the scene with Harold Lloyd in Safety Last! (1923), hanging from the clock, is shown when the main characters sneak into a movie theater. Later, Hugo, like Lloyd in Safety Last!, hangs from the hands of a large clock on a clock tower to escape from a pursuer.

Several viewings of the 1895 film L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat are portrayed, depicting the shocked reaction of the audience—although this view is in doubt.

Emil Lager, Ben Addis, and Robert Gill make cameo appearances as the father of Gypsy jazz guitar, Django Reinhardt, the Spanish surrealist painter, Salvador Dalí, and the Irish writer James Joyce, respectively. The names of all three characters appear towards the end of the film’s cast credit list.^[22]

The book that Monsieur Labisse gives Hugo as a gift, Robin Hood le proscrit (Robin Hood the outlaw), was written by Alexandre Dumas in 1864 as a French translation of an 1838 work by Pierce Egan the Younger in England. The book is symbolic, as Hugo must avoid the “righteous” law enforcement (Inspector Gustave) to live in the station and later to restore the automaton both to a functioning status and to its rightful owner. The particular copy given to Hugo looks like the 1917 English-language edition (David McKay publisher, Philadelphia, United States) with cover and interior illustrations by N.C. Wyeth, but with “Le Proscrit” added to the cover by the prop department. The film also depicts the Montparnasse derailment, when at 4:00 pm on 22 October 1895, the Granville–Paris Express overran the buffer stop at its Gare Montparnasse terminus.

Hugo was nominated for eleven Academy Awards, among them a Best Picture nomination, and it won five awards including Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, Best Sound Mixing, Best Sound Editing, and Best Visual Effects. After watching Hugo myself, all of its accolades seem to me to be well deserved. The film is beautiful and magical, with fantastical sets and special effects that look amazing more than a decade after its release. The train crash sequence and all of the scenes wherein the clock gears are moving are particular standouts. 

The movie features excellent acting performances all around, including from its legends Christopher Lee and Ben Kingsley, as well as the young actors Asa Butterfield and Chloë Grace Moretz. I even liked Sascha Baron Cohen’s retrained comedic relief as the station inspector. What I liked about the movie most of all is that it was made for children and made well. The child characters are intelligent and curious who face and overcome real problems, Hugo Cabret’s personal trauma is present in the story but not glorified or over-magnified, and the story concluded with a happy ending worthy of the movies that Scorsese loves so much.

The part of the story that resonated with me was its depiction of the transient nature of public praise, its relationship with purpose, and the lesson the film teaches about how to react to changing sentiments. The things which are fashionable and loved today can be disregarded tomorrow. Even when that happens, though, we should not despair. The love and appreciation that leaves us sometimes returns and if we are in a state of despair, we might not even know. Georges Méliès was beloved and revered, but in his brokenness, he did not know. The important thing is to remain true to yourself. The boy protagonist in the film, Hugo, is true to himself, and his purpose (repairing the automaton) and by refusing to give up in the face of his circumstances, he eventually restores both the automaton and Georges Méliès, who had not been able to avoid giving up on his own purpose. Once restored, though, Georges Méliès, endeavors to to repair the broken and lonely Hugo in return. 

If you love the movies, the backdrop and sounds of Paris, or stories about children triumphing over terrible circumstances, I recommend giving Hugo a viewing. This movie should be relatively safe for most kids about eight years of age and older. There is no bad language, no “adult” scenes, and it handles the tragic backstory of Hugo with a great amount of care. That said, the story is subtle, somewhat emotionally heavy,and artistic, and might be boring for young children – aside from the train crash scene, anyway. I enjoyed all of it.

Have you seen Hugo? What did you think?