HUGO (2011) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Martin Scorsese
Asa Butterfield, Ben Kingsley, Chloë Grace Moretz,
Sacha Baron Cohen, Christopher Lee, Emily Mortimer,
Helen McCrory, Ray Winstone, Jude Law,
Richard Griffiths, Michal Stuhlberg, Frances de la Tour
An inventive kid living in the clockworks of a railroad station in 1930s Paris tries to repair a treasured museum piece - a mechanical man - which leads him to an old shopkeeper, the all-but-forgotten filmmaker Georges Méliès. This is Martin Scorsese's valentine to silent film, and he goes way back, to the Lumière brothers and that late-19th-century shot of the train pulling into the station. There's the Edison Kinetoscope shot of two men dancing, and the shot from "The Great Train Robbery" of the outlaw firing his revolver into the camera, and, of course, there's Méliès. The kids' adventure story line is a departure for Scorsese, but it's unmistakably his work, a movie lover's movie for the ages. Its action-crammed opening reel might be a little too busy, and some of the side characters and subplots barely get a chance to register, but if Scorsese's ambition sometimes exceeds what the script can grasp, who cares? His passion for the medium and its history is infectious, and the movie looks great, an amber-and-sepia journey back in time, and a tribute to the spirit of invention and magic that made cinema possible in the first place. The line connecting Méliès and Scorsese isn't such a long one, after all.
