[Reposting my piece for Fandor]
Part of the Series The Silent Artists
A Dreamland of Magic: Asa Butterfield and Chloe Moretz in Martin Scorsese's "Hugo"
Hugo is clearly a departure for Martin Scorsese, as a 3D feature ostensibly about and for children, free of violence, and rarely very dark. Yet anyone familiar with the director’s work, especially in film preservation and scholarship (itself committed on film through documentaries like A Personal Journey Through American Movies) will know it is also entirely in his wheelhouse, as a valentine to the origins of cinema.
More simply, it is the story of Hugo Cabret, a smart but lonely orphan in a steampunk-ish 1930s Paris, who fends for himself in a railway station’s clock tower. Hugo (played by The Boy in the Striped Pajamas’ Asa Butterfield, who oddly looks like a small Maggie Gyllenhaal, with piercing green eyes, elfin nose and moppish hair) strikes an initially adversarial relationship with a toy shopkeeper (Ben Kingsley). He then befriends the man’s bookwormish but forward daughter Isabelle (the appealing Chloe Moretz, here with an English accent; it’s one of those films set in Continental Europe where a compromise is made to make all the characters act British). The two kids move from trying to solve one mystery–reconnecting with the boy’s dead father–to a question of more historical import: what happened to magician and early film pioneer Georges’ Méliès.
As the story unfolds, Hugo becomes more connected to cinema itself. Hugo recalls that his father once told him seeing a film is “like seeing his dreams in the middle of the day,” and sneaks Isabelle into her first movie screening, Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last (that film’s famous clock-hanging sequence is a bit of an on-the-nose set-up for a later scene, but one can forgive such things). They go to a library and discover a book about movie history, which reveals both the answer to a pressing riddle as well as the book’s author (a bearded Michael Stuhlbarg), who personally regales them with tales of the first movies in all their mystery and power, such as how the Lumiere brothers‘ Arrival of a Train sent audiences leaping from their seats, expecting the train to actually hit them.
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