Hugo's History Lesson

I wasn't sure how well I'd like Hugo, Martin Scorsese's 3D film about a boy living in a Paris train station. Hugo is an orphan, and he lives alone in a workspace within the station, but so long as he keeps the clocks running, no one will check in on the clock man, and Hugo's secret is safe. Boy Hugo's story is maudlin. The real story in Hugo is movie history, which comes alive. This surprised me, because other than comedies, I find early movies farcically boring. But Scorsese mixes compelling story-telling techniques deftly into this two hour visual wonder.



Theme and foreshadowing are expertly woven into the story. The early Lumiere brothers' pioneering film of a train arriving at a station is retold, at first matter of factly: When audiences saw it, they ducked as the train moved toward them. Later, that audience experience is shown to us. Still later, a dream has a train arriving to a stop, coming in fast. One of the final scenes involves a train arrival. A famous photo is animated, of the Granville-Paris Express wreck of 1895. And finally, the story takes place in a train station, against a backdrop of clock works enormous and tiny, functional and whimsical.

There is a lot of nonsense in the film. Why can a child master of clocks and locks not start an automaton without a simple heart shaped key. Why is Melies depressed? (Wikipedia is more helpful in this regard than the film. It involves money and probably rivalry, hardly the avuncular image presented in Hugo.) How can a child live unobserved in a train station, with no one ever checking in on the clocks or the clock keeper?

Surprisingly, the film is not well acted. Asa Butterfield is totally unconvincing as Hugo. None of the leads are more than effective. I give Kingsley a pass, because with his simple expressions he gives life to an otherwise dull man. He doesn't have a lot to work with, plot-wise. Sacha Baron Cohen, as the station's police inspector, rescues what he can of the larger plot with some comedy. Hugo is a film about film, and one of the subtle and charming aspects of Cohen's performance is how his stern inspector tries to smile and become at ease, something early directors and actors had to learn.

Scorsese's triumph is not the story of Hugo, but that of filmmaking. The movie opens with a long tracking shot over Paris, zooming in on a Montparnasse-inspired station. The 3D effects give the scenes within the large clocks the clever wonder of a child's pop up book. The movie has almost an animated feel from the layers of detail. Later, those layers show up again, in Melies' studio, with sets brought into the new medium from stage shows. Melies was making movies in 1896. Birth of a Nation and The Tramp didn't come until 1915. Harold Lloyd started acting in movies in 1914; Buster Keaton in 1917. I've never experienced very early films with the same wonder I felt seeing them remade in Hugo.

A Trip to the Moon, by Melies, complete with spaceship landing in the eye of the man on the moon: