Review: Hugo 3D (U)

Martin Scorsese’s attempt to inspire in children his own early love of cinema is at least a justified use of 3D, but its first hour is flat, lacking real wonder

GIVEN Martin Scorsese’s lifelong love affair with movies began when he was a child, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that the director of Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and Goodfellas should want to make a family movie. His work, after all, tends to reflect his first passion either directly or indirectly when he’s exploring the other factors that have shaped him as a person and as a film-maker (his Italian-American heritage, his Catholicism, his feel for New York), so why not make a film about cinema suitable for audiences primed to fall head-over-heels with its magic at the same age that he did?

Hugo is his attempt to do just that. Adapted from Brian Selznick’s 2007 children’s novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, it’s an elaborate, audacious, technically dazzling and aesthetically beautiful work that uses cutting-edge technology not only to pay tribute to the primitive wonders of the art form in its infancy, but also to flag up the importance of preserving the past as a window into another world. Unfortunately, it’s also a rather staid fantasy adventure film that can’t quite reconcile Scorsese’s heart-swelling ability to proselytise about cinema with his inability to connect us directly to the story at hand.

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Set in Paris in the 1930s, that story revolves around an orphaned boy called Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), a small, thoughtful and self-reliant child who secretly lives within the walls of the city’s magnificent train station where he attends to the smooth running of the building’s numerous clocks. This Quasimodo-like existence is a result of losing his father – a watchmaker played in flashback by Jude Law – in a tragic accident, something that has left him with nothing but inherited mechanical knowhow, his father’s notebook and an automaton they were trying to repair together. This automaton, rescued from a museum, has been designed to mimic the art of writing, and Hugo is convinced that if he can only get it to work it will provide him with a final message from his father.

Unfortunately, in his efforts to steal spare parts from a toy stall in the station, Hugo has his notebook confiscated by the owner, a grouchy toymaker known by his bookish ward Isabel (Chloë Grace Moretz) as Papa George. Played with stern solemnity by Sir Ben Kingsley, Papa George informs Hugo that he will burn the notebook, a rather extreme course of action, though the look of pain that flashes across his eyes as he flicks through drawings of the Metropolis-like automaton suggests he has a personal connection to it that Hugo can’t yet possibly understand.

It thus falls to Isabel – who takes an instant liking to Hugo – to help him retrieve it. Hugo, in return, promises to fulfil her yearning for the kind of adventures she only reads about in books. As they dodge about, trying to avoid an officious station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) with a gammy leg and a penchant for delivering stray children to the orphanage, Scorsese’s camera swoops and zooms and twirls through this magnificent space without ever really conveying the breathless sense of excitement the kids keep informing us they’re experiencing. Indeed, for much of the first hour Hugo is surprisingly dull. Everything looks authentically wondrous, but the action is as mechanical as the robot the kids are trying to get working. Whether or not that’s down to Scorsese spending his own sickly childhood watching movies rather than running about is hard to say, but he can’t seem to instinctively deliver the requisite child-like sense of wonder the way, say, Steven Spielberg can. Compared to the latter’s recent Tintin, Hugo’s thrills feel rather studied.

And then something lovely happens. As the kids uncover Papa George’s real identity, Hugo transforms – albeit all-too-briefly – into a wonderfully bold and engaging journey through silent cinema. It’s here that Scorsese comes into his own, transforming his remarkable ability to enthuse audiences about the power of film by reconfiguring his professorial abilities for the purposes of a fictional narrative that brings film history thoroughly alive for kids and adults alike. The magic show-like tricks and illusions used to make the films of cinema’s earliest pioneers are deconstructed and exposed in playful fashion – in part cheekily to advocate for Scorsese’s own deployment of 3D in Hugo (which actually does give some credence to the pro-3D camp that argues the technology enhances the sense of space on screen).

Beautiful though it is, though, it’s not quite enough to make up for the shortfalls elsewhere. As with many a film that expends a lot of energy commenting on the value of good storytelling, instead of just getting on and telling a good story, Hugo feels oddly lacking in self-awareness. It’s a film that’s easier to like and admire than to love.

RATING: ***