by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night the “feature” Charles and I ran was Hugo, one I’d recently ordered from Columbia House DVD
Club after both of us had missed it during its theatrical run. While it would
have been nice to see it on the big screen and in 3-D — it’s a measure of the
skill of director Martin Scorsese (I’ve missed a lot of his big movies because
I was turned off by his obsession with criminal violence and the Mafia as
subject matter, but I’ve liked quite a few of the films Scorsese mavens think are his less interesting ones, like The
Last Temptation of Christ and The
Aviator) and cinematographer Robert
Richardson that even watched from a DVD on an old low-res medium-sized TV, the
depth of field was stunning and the film looked like it had been shot in 3-D (which the movie we
watched the night before, Underworld: Awakening — even though it was also released in 3-D in
theatres — had not). Hugo began
as a “young adult” novel by Brian Selznick — a relative but not a direct descendant of the legendary moviemaker
David O. Selznick (according to his imdb.com page he’s the grandson of a first
cousin of David Selznick and his agent brother Myron) — and it became a movie
thanks to producer Graham King, who’s been bankrolling most of Scorsese’s
recent productions. It’s also the first film Scorsese has made in 12 years that
did not star Leonardo DiCaprio,
probably because the three leads are two children and an old man.
Set in Paris
in 1931 (at least that’s what the imdb.com synopsis said, though my guess was
1925 because a movie theatre in Paris is showing Harold Lloyd’s Safety
Last and in a film whose plot largely
revolves around movies, moviemaking and moviegoing, there’s no mention of the
talkies), Hugo tells the story of
Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), the son of a museum staff member who’s developed
a knack for building and fixing clocks. Dad brings home a mechanical man — an
“automaton,” as they were called in France in the 19th century (when
there was a major vogue for such things) — that was donated to the museum but
is just gathering dust because it doesn’t work and nobody knows how to fix it.
Hugo eventually figures out how to get the thing working again, but in the
meantime he’s been caught stealing from the Gare du Montparnasse train station
by Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley), who runs a small toy concession there. Georges
threatens to call the station inspector (Sasha Baron Cohen) — a delightfully
inept cop whom I joked was the grandfather of Inspector Clouseau (and indeed
Cohen was made up to look quite similar to Peter Sellers as Clouseau) but at
least some of his ineptitudes are explained by his having lost a leg in combat
in World War I and his having to make do with a barely functional artificial
leg — and steals the mysterious notebook Hugo was carrying that includes a
series of flip drawings by which a face (a similar face to that of the
automaton) appears to move. Georges says to Hugo that he can work off the cost
of the items he stole and an edgy relationship develops between the crabby old
man and the boy. The boy also meets Georges’ goddaughter Isabelle (Chloë Grace
Moretz), and a relationship develops between them after Hugo’s father is burned to death in a fire at
the museum. Hugo is sent to live inside the Montparnasse station with his uncle
Claude (Ray Winstone), a chronic alcoholic on his last legs, whose job it is to
keep the elaborate network of clocks in the station wound and in good repair.
Only several months later Claude is found drowned in the frozen-over Seine and
everyone at the station is baffled by that because they have no idea Hugo has
been filling in for him, winding and fixing the clocks and thereby doing his
uncle’s job.
The film is basically two parallel plot lines, one centered around
Hugo’s situation, his success in repairing the automaton and getting its
attached pen to work (though it’s a fountain pen and the automaton seems to
have an endless supply of ink — it doesn’t have to keep dipping its pen into an
inkwell the way a human writer would), his growing interest in Isabelle and his
confession to her that when his dad was alive they used to go to movies together
every time they could (they sneak into the theatre that’s showing Safety
Last but they’re caught, and Isabelle says
it’s the first time she’s been to a movie because “Papa” Georges won’t let her
go and can’t stand them himself). The other story is about Georges himself,
who’s taken great pains to conceal his past, to the point of destroying
virtually every relic of it he can find, and who turns out to be [spoiler
alert!] the great pioneering filmmaker
Georges Méliès, who in the first decade of the 20th century was one
of the world’s leading actor/writer/directors. He began as a stage magician and
got into filmmaking seriously when he was playing with a movie camera and it
jammed; when he developed the film he found that, though the camera hadn’t
moved, a carriage had mysteriously turned into a bus. Méliès was the first
filmmaker to build his entire style around special effects — the “effects
movie,” for good and ill, was truly born in his Star Film studio — and he was
also a fanatic about intellectual property rights, going so far as to
incorporate the Star Film logo into his sets so his films couldn’t be pirated
(the beginning of the modern practice of TV stations and DVD companies to
insert their logos into a corner of the screen). He also built a studio whose
walls were made out of glass — mainly because in the early days the only really
useful source of lighting for films was the sun, and the glass was designed to
let the sunlight in (though Méliès must have had diffusers, shutters or some
other contraption to vary the intensity of the sunlight coming in, because
without such devices film shot in broad daylight would have been hopelessly
overexposed).
Hugo and Isabelle do a lot of hanging out in a combination
bookstore and lending library owned by Monsieur Labisse (Christopher Lee), and
through him they get in touch with one of the pioneers of film preservation,
movie librarian Rene Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg), who gives them a book to read
about the early days of movies that contains a chapter on Méliès. Rene actually
visited Méliès’ studio in the glory days — his older brother worked as a
carpenter there — and eventually, particularly after Hugo and Isabelle find a
cache of drawings for Méliès’ films in a hidden drawer in an armoire in
Georges’ apartment, they realize that Georges is Méliès and his wife Jeanne (Helen McCrory) was his
assistant in his magic act and then appeared frequently in his films. The story
of Hugo is almost entirely
atmosphere and character vignettes — and the threat of being taken away from
his tenuous attempts to retain a family and essentially jailed in an orphanage
is such a running theme in the plot one is reminded of Charles Dickens and
Victor Hugo (in fact I wondered if naming the central character “Hugo” was
deliberately intended as a Victor Hugo tribute) — and it’s the sort of movie
that more or less ambles to a conclusion rather than ending with a bang (though
it almost ends with a bang when Hugo, fleeing from the station inspector, drops
the precious automaton over some train tracks and, when he tries to save it, is
nearly killed himself by an oncoming train — an event he’d had a premonition of
in a dream that paralleled the early film by the Lumière brothers in which they
shot a train coming in a station and audiences who watched the film screamed
and fled in horror from the theatre for fear an actual train was bearing down
on them), though the final scene shows Méliès (whose drop in popularity is
attributed, in the script by John Logan from Selznick’s novel, to the real-life
horrors of World War I rendering his charming fantasies obsolete and no longer
of interest to audiences) introducing a revival showing of his films that Rene
has curated.
Hugo is a rich
movie, full of fascinating depths, and an interesting bookend to the film that
beat it out of the major Academy Awards, The Artist, in that both are tributes to the silent-film era —
and though Hugo doesn’t go as far
as The Artist did in eschewing
dialogue altogether, it’s a marvelously balanced movie that tells as much of its
story in pictures and pantomime and uses dialogue only when it has to (the sort of movie a lot of intellectuals in the
late 1920’s and early 1930’s thought would become commonplace once the novelty
of “100 percent all-talking” wore off and the screen, having learned to speak,
would re-learn when it was best off shutting up). It’s also a highly personal
film for Martin Scorsese: a director who’s been a leader in film preservation
(a cause he got into when he realized the films he made in the 1970’s were starting
to fade within a few years — he had the bad luck to start his major directorial
career when Eastmancolor had introduced a new, cheaper film stock that faded
faster than the ones they’d had before) making a movie in which film
preservation is an integral part of the plot — and it’s a bitter story that
reminds us that Méliès was one of the first people in the film world who fell
as far as he rose. The plot line involving him is all too vivid in its
depiction of the cruelty with which the film business treats its elders,
writing them off as has-beens and letting them live in penury while consigning
their films themselves to a scrap heap (there’s a grimly amusing scene in which
Méliès recalls being so broke he had to sell the physical prints of his films
to a chemical company, which ended up using them to make high heels for women’s
shoes — and Scorsese cuts to some shots of women’s heels, presumably in the
shoes made from Méliès’ magical movies) — something Brian Selznick would have
known about all too well from his own family’s history. Hugo is a film of real charm, maybe not quite a
masterpiece but certainly an underrated little gem and proof once again (in
case any were still needed) that there are other things Scorsese can do besides
violence and crime.
I also found myself wondering if Ben Kingsley had ever
played any real-life characters besides Méliès and his star-making turn as
Mahatma Gandhi — and according to his filmography on imdb.com, he’s done quite
a few: Dr. John Elliotson in a 1976 British TV miniseries about Charles
Dickens; Vladimir Lenin and
Dimitri Shostakovich in 1988 productions (different movies made the same year);
Simon Wiesenthal in a made-for-TV biopic in 1989; Pericles in a 1991 TV-movie
called The War That Never Ends; Meyer
Lansky in Barry Levinson’s Bugsy
(with Warren Beatty as Bugsy Siegel); the Jewish accountant and
concentration-camp inmate in what’s probably Kingsley’s second-best-known
credit, Schindler’s List (1994);
and Anne Frank’s father Otto in yet another Holocaust-themed story, a 2001 TV
mini-series called Anne Frank: The Whole Story.
