Hugo | Film review

SHINE A LIGHT Butterfield and Moretz delight in a movie.

Can Martin Scorsese make a generation of young viewers as nostalgic for film preservation as they would be for Ninja Turtles or Muppets? Faithfully adapted from Brian Selznick’s award-winning novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the director’s first foray into children’s filmmaking isn’t Harry Potter 9. Its eponymous orphan loves an altogether more familiar form of magic: the movies.

Selznick’s education story couldn’t be more suited to the director if it included an advertisement for his Film Foundation. (In a sense, it does: As much as it sounds like Scorsese’s doing, the dialogue of René Tabard, a historian played by Michael Stuhlbarg, mostly comes from the book.) Hugo is, first and foremost, a personal project—a tribute from one great artist to another. A major character is Georges Méliès, the pioneering filmmaker (1902’s “A Trip to the Moon”) known for his experimentation with in-camera tricks, special effects, superimposition and most of the basic devices we associate with the cinema of the fantastic.

To pay homage to such an innovator, Scorsese has responded, appropriately enough, by pushing the boundaries of the medium. In ways both obvious and eccentric, Hugo boasts the most elaborate and exciting use of live-action 3-D to emerge from the recent vanguard. Robert Richardson’s camera immerses us in the metal beams and crunching gears and steam wafts of a Parisian train station where Hugo (confident newcomer Asa Butterfield) winds the clocks, always evading the eye of a sneering, bushy-mustached stationmaster (Sacha Baron Cohen) who wants to put him in an orphanage.

In a stunningly tactile opening, the movie plunges us from a snow-flecked Paris cityscape (re-created in England’s Shepperton Studios) through the station and up to Hugo’s clock-tower home. It’s here that the protagonist, alone after the death of his father (Jude Law in flashbacks) and disappearance of his uncle (Ray Winstone), stares down from behind the station clock and watches a toy seller (Ben Kingsley). Like the young man in Goodfellas, he covets: The merchant has parts Hugo needs to repair an automaton, a primitive robot the boy’s father acquired in a museum and intended to fix.

Hugo soon meets the toy dealer’s goddaughter (Chloë Grace Moretz), his partner in crime for the film’s adventures. Expanding from the novel, the movie generously devotes time to the comedy of station life. Even when the narrative stalls, the periphery asserts itself as the director’s true playhouse. A bedroom’s art direction has been replicated from an acknowledged influence, René Clair’s Under the Roofs of Paris. The automaton’s design borrows from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. No film with a tower would be complete without a Vertigo nod, and Hugo doesn’t disappoint.

More quirkily, the color scheme subtly emphasizes the reds and blues, as if the entire film were being seen through old-fashioned ’50s 3-D glasses. The filmmaker’s roving camera has always suggested a dimensionality inadequate to 2-D. (One breathtaking sequence circles around the theft of a croissant.) The real question isn’t why Scorsese is joining the stereoscopy bandwagon now, but why it’s taken him so long. While it might be unfair to psychoanalyze the director’s choice of material, Hugo seems fundamentally autobiographical—a fable about a boy’s discovery of the plastic pleasures of the movies. You can picture Hugo growing up to make a film like Hugo.