Film Review: 'Hugo' is a dream on screen

Photo by Paramount Pictures, Jaap Buitendijk

Asa Butterfield portrays Hugo Cabret (left) and Ben Kingsley plays Georges Méliès in a scene from "Hugo."

According to movie-history folklore, viewers of the Lumiere Brothers’ “The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station” were panicked by the shot of an approaching train when the 50-second film was screened for the first time in 1895.

Unfamiliar with cinema technology, these pioneer moviegoers thought the filmed locomotive was somehow going to jump the tracks and crush them, the story goes.

However exaggerated, this anecdote testifies to the power of film, and also offers a prophecy of 3D. For both these reasons, that famous 1895 screening is recreated as a flashback within “Hugo,” a movie that is advertised as a children’s adventure story but might more accurately be described as director Martin Scorsese’s love letter to cinema, set in the city of storybook romance, Paris. Even the movie’s clockwork automaton is motivated by a symbol of love: He is brought to life by a key shaped like a Valentine’s heart.

Hugo

Twelve-year-old Hugo lives in the walls of a busy Paris train station, where his survival depends on secrets and anonymity. But when his world suddenly ...

Rating: PG for mild thematic material, some action/peril and smoking

Length: 127 minutes

Released: November 23, 2011 Nationwide

Cast: Asa Butterfield, Chloe Moretz, Jude Law, Emily Mortimer, Christopher Lee

Director: Martin Scorsese

Writer: John Logan, Brian Selznick

More info and showtimes »

The movie also promotes a concern very dear to Scorsese’s heart: film preservation. The movie’s saddest moment doesn’t involve orphans or dogs (both of which are present in the story); instead, it occurs when real-life forgotten genius filmmaker Georges Méliès, a character in the film, reports that at the lowest point of his life, his films were melted down into chemicals for use in the manufacture of shoe heels.

A stage magician turned filmmaker, Méliès marvels that the movies represented “a new kind of magic” — a statement that justifies Scorsese’s decision to explore the new magic of digital 3D.

Animated movies and horror thrill shows aside, “Hugo” may be the first film of the current 3D revival since “Avatar” that truly benefits from the dimensional process. A master filmmaker, Scorsese understands that what makes 3D work is not so much throwing objects toward the lens, which causes moviegoers to flinch away from the screen, but the use of deep focus and depth of field, which invites the viewer into the screen. (Even smart 2D filmmakers understand this, as Orson Welles famously demonstrated in “Citizen Kane.”)

“Hugo” is the story of a young 1930s orphan, Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), who lives in secret within the walls of a Paris train station; much of the 3D effect comes from following Hugo through these deep hidden corridors, across catwalks and among the cogs and gears of great clocks.

The station — a large, beautifully organized set that reminds one of Welles’ comments that a movie studio represented “the biggest electric-train set a boy ever had!” — presents Hugo with a microcosmic community and a pretend sort of family. Its regular inhabitants include a flower girl (Emily Mortimer), a newspaper vendor (Richard Griffiths), a bookshop owner (Christopher Lee), whose presence ensures that “Hugo” celebrates the wonder of reading as well as the joy of moviegoing, and the comically officious station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), whose leg brace is one of the station environment’s more primitive mechanical fixtures. (In one shot, the inspector uses the strength of his arms to ascend peg by peg to an upper level of the station, in a reference to Lon Chaney’s performance in 1920’s “The Penalty.”)

Hugo’s first real friend is a precocious booksmart girl, Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz), granddaughter of the station’s stern toy shop owner (Ben Kingsley). Isabelle is immediately sympathetic to Hugo’s plight and interested in helping him restore the small mechanical automaton that is one of the boy’s only links to his late father (Jude Law). When the automaton’s mechanical arm automatically draws a comical picture of the “man in the moon” with a rocketship stuck in its eye, the two friends uncover a mystery, and rediscover — with the help of a film historian (Michael Stuhlbarg) — the forgotten and self-exiled (from moviemaking) Méliès.

The Méliès aspect of the story is undoubtedly what attracted Scorsese in the first place to Brian Selznick’s 2007 illustrated novel, “The Invention of Hugo Cabret.” Like a great clock, the movie, scripted by John Logan (“Rango”), ticks by rather slowly at first, but its cumulative effect is powerful, especially as Scorsese — aided by the presence of a film historian character (Michael Stuhlbarg) — revisits the magical early days of silent cinema, with clips of Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and, especially, from the many early fantasy and science-fiction “trick” films of Méliès,. The French genius Méliès who made some 500 films from 1896 to 1914, and invented or popularized such special-effects as multiple exposures, dissolves, time-lapse photography.

Scorsese recreates Méliès’ famous greenhouse-style glass studio, and restages scenes from several Méliès shorts. These recreations represent a true labor of love, and are quite moving. At one point, Hugo says that going to the movies is like “dreaming in the middle of the day,” and “Hugo,” with its mix of history, fantasy, premonitions, nightmares, actual film clips and recreations, is very much a dream of a film.

It’s also something very rare: a celebration of past achievement that doesn’t succumb to nostalgia. “Time hasn’t been kind to old movies,” the historian character laments; with “Hugo,” Scorsese does what he can to make amends, not only by paying his respects to the past but by demonstrating that the artform Méliès loved continues to thrive.

Note: Through Jan. 8, the Dixon Gallery and Gardens at 4339 Park is hosting “From Houdini to Hugo: The Art of Brian Selznick,” an exhibition of more than 100 illustrations by the author of “The Invention of Hugo Cabret.” Moviegoers who attend “Hugo” can bring their Malco ticket stub to the Dixon for $2 off admission to the exhibition.

— John Beifuss: 529-2394

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