Hugo (Martin Scorsese, 2011): USA

Reviewed by Andrea Uttenthal. Viewed at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, 2012.

Martin Scorsese and 3D – What’s not to like? Being nominated for 11 Oscars, including Best Picture, Hugo is without a doubt a must-see for everyone. It has everything! Beautiful visuals, great performances and themes like love, magic and passion.
Hugo takes its viewers on a thrilling journey to a magical world based on Brian Selznick’s award-winning, imaginative New York Times bestseller, The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

The year is 1930. Hugo is an orphan living in the walls of a train station in central Paris. He is left under the care of his drunk uncle, whose job is to take care of the clock at the train station. When his uncle suddenly takes of, Hugo has to maintain working on the clocks so that no one becomes suspicious and finds him living alone. Every day Hugo has to steal food to survive and constantly keep an eye out for the station inspection and his dog, who are always on the lookout for young orphans and thieves to be sent to the orphanage.  After his dad dies, Hugo is left with the mystery of a missing key to an automaton that him and his father started to rebuilt. To keep the memory of his father alive, Hugo decides to fix the automaton, which is designed to write. He gets obsessed with his mission and as times goes by, he is certain that it will unlock a secret left to him by his father. With help from his newfound friend, Isabelle, Hugo gets involved in another magic mystery that brings everyone back to the past and the early narrative film-making.

The acting of the two leading kids Asa Butterfield and Chloë Grace Moretz (Hugo and Isabelle) should be defined as perfection. They both did incredible performances, which only improved the overall impression of this film.
Sir Ben Kingsley also did a remarkable job as the forgotten filmmaker Georges Méliès, and even Sasha Baron Cohen in the role of the station inspector, which is far from what he usually plays (with both Borat and Brüno on my mind), did a fantastic job throughout the film.

What I really liked about Hugo is that it doesn’t limit anyone concerning age. It has something for everyone wether it’s adventure, drama, mystery or the early history of filmmaking. The fact that it’s made in 3D made the film even more astonishing and adventures! The film is very colorful, vibrant colors, and the picture of Paris in the 30’s is just beautiful.
When I went to the honoring of Martin Scorsese last week, he told us that his direction of the 3D was to create “art as opposed a gimmick. … that turned into drama, and that drama turned into an art form that uses depth to tell stories in such a unique way.” And it really was unique!

Scorsese himself became familiar with the Lumière Brothers and Georges Méliès, when he was a kid and that’s where his love for film began. In Hugo we learned about these masters and the beginning of narrative filmmaking. We saw clips from several of Méliès’ actual movies, including A Trip to the Moon and also the Lumière Brother’s Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, which was the first time an event was captured on film. Not only do we get a wonderful and exciting story, that I myself had not heard before, but we are taking down the path of early filmmaking. The way Scorsese portrayed Georges Méliès in Hugo is done with great reality, since he was actually found, years after his great period, working in a toy store at a train station in Montparnasse in Paris.

You can’t help falling in love with this film. I couldn’t resist giving it a huge applause once it ended. It definitely deserves Best Picture Nomination!