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| Asa Butterfield and Chlöe Grace Moretz in Hugo. © Paramount. |
Taxi Driver. Raging Bull. The Last Temptation of Christ. Goodfellas. Gangs of New York. The Aviator. The Departed. Shutter Island. After a sequence like that, a family adventure film would be the last thing to expect from Martin Scorsese. And yet there is Hugo, the third film in history to be nominated for all technical categories at the Oscars. It is also the director's first experience with 3D, and it can be safely said that no other picture has made better use of the resource in the history of film. (That includes, like James Cameron himself said, Avatar.)
That becomes evident in the first minutes, in an astonishing sequence at the train station where the movie will take place. We are in Paris, 1931. Behind the clocks, a boy observes the buzz in the station. Right after that, he attempts to steal mechanical pieces from one of the shops and is caught by the elderly owner, who, after an earful, takes a notepad away from his hands, and, stunned by its content, says he'll burn it as soon as he gets home. You can tell, by the boy's despair, that the notepad is more important than it seemed. At night, the boy, who turns out to be the titular Hugo Cabret, goes to the old man's house and asks a girl -- presumably his daughter -- for help retrieving the notepad. She hesitates, but, in light of Hugo's insistence, promises to do what it takes to keep the old man from burning it.
Back at home, Hugo stares gloomily at a human-like robot, which we had previously seen as a drawing on the notepad, and with the scene are interleaved flashbacks that show us that the robot is a broken automaton brought from a museum by the boy's father. Both tried to fix it, until Hugo's father died in a fire and he went to the custody of his alcoholic uncle, who since then has made him help him with the maintenance of the station's clocks. The next day, Hugo gets a deal with the old man: he will have his notepad back if he works for him until he settles the losses he caused to the shop.
In the meantime, Hugo manages to repair the automaton, little by little. While he grows closer to the old man's adoptive daughter, the savant and adorable Isabelle, the director's intention to pay homage to the beginnings of cinema is made clear: both kids watch a silent film -- in secret, for the old man for some reason doesn't allow the girl to go to the movies --, Hugo tells Isabelle about how he and his father used to go to the movies together etc. Simultaneously, they begin to unveil the mystery surrounding the automaton, and soon it's clear that it has some connection to the old man. They go to Isabelle's house for information, and end up discovering a secret box where tens, possibly hundreds of drawings and annotations hide -- and, when they spread out across the room in an unfortunate accident, right when the old man enters home, it is noted that the drawings match scenes from the nearly 500 silent films made by the celebrated Georges Méliès, a pioneer of narrative films. Yes, they will find out: the girl's father is the man, presumed dead in World War II and whose body of work was reduced by time to a single negative. Confronted, and with his heart softened after re-watching his anthological A Trip to the Mooon thanks to a scholar's visit, Méliès ends up telling the whole truth, and then the image that he had struggled to hide surfaces, that of the bankrupt, renegade filmmaker who had been forced to sell his negatives as scrap.
Amid such revelations, the movie walks the path of a masterpiece, not only for the intriguing, moving plot, adapted from the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, but for the details: the delicious score, the breathtaking visuals, the nostalgic aura, the great cast -- headlined by the promising Asa Butterfield and Chlöe Grace Moretz -- and, most of all, the 3D. Scorsese doesn't make it a recreational resource, as is oh-so-increasingly-costumary: the 3D is used to highlight the character's expressions, the beautiful Parisian landscapes, an exhibition of A Trip to the Moon, the art department's superb work. And it is so well-used it becomes ingrained in the film, to the point that I presume it will be a strange experience to watch it again in 2D. Nearing his 70s, Scorsese is in the autumn of his career -- and yet he doesn't seem to be past his prime. With Hugo, he not only proves he's not a director restricted to the serious, violent films he's known for, but he also pays a passionate tribute to his craft and one of its precursors, as masterfully as only a director his size would be capable of.
Final rating:
Academy Awards: Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing and Best Visual Effects. Also nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Martin Scorsese), Best Adapted Screenplay (John Logan), Best Film Editing, Best Original Score (Howard Shore) and Best Costume Design
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