Hugo

Year: 2011
Running time: 126 minutes

Certificate: U

Language: English

Screenplay: John Logan

Director: Martin Scorsese

Starring: Asa Butterfield, Chloë Grace Moretz, Ben Kingsley, Jude Law, Ray Winstone, Christopher Lee, Sacha Baron Cohen

Hugo and Isabelle visit the movies.

This is a really unusual entry into the Scorsese canon, filled with whimsey and odd shifts in tone, but I found that I loved it nonetheless. Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) lives alone in a huge Parisian railway station, following the death of his uncle Claude (Ray Winstone), where he scurries through the walls fixing and maintaining the clocks. Before this, Hugo lived with this father (Jude Law), and the only thing he has left to connect to his beloved dead father is a mechanical automaton that he is trying to fix.

Hugo spends his days fixing clocks, trying to find the secret key for his automaton and avoiding the station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), who is trying to get Hugo shipped off to an orphanage. He also get involved in the lives of a very cranky shopkeeper Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley) (yes, as it turns out, that Georges Méliès) and his god-daughter Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz).

This is an engaging enough time spent with the film-loving Hugo and his new friend Isabelle as they unlock the mystery of the mechanical man, but at some point the film lurches, for want of a better word, into a celebration of Méliès' work, with scenes and set ups lovingly recreated by Scorsese. It is never clearer than during this extended sequence that Scorsese is a man that utterly adores cinema, and having spent a lifetime honing that craft, puts that love unashamedly onscreen for all to see. And he's so good, that I found myself loving cinema more than I ever did while watching it. It's mesmerising.

Georges sits and thinks about the past.

I think Hugo is meant to be a film for children; the first half seems clearly aimed at a younger audience. I am not sure, to be honest, how it plays with the TikTok generation; my girls liked it well enough when they first saw it, but now they're a little older I don't think it would hold their attention. And when it changes to something else entirely, that homage to the early years of cinema, it seem to give up all pretence of being a film for kids and just becomes a cinephile's dream.

I loved it, because I've loved film for years and years, but I am unconvinced regarding how successfully it can reach its apparent target audience.

Almost two different films, I found myself enjoying the first, loving the second, but slightly surprised at how Scorsese jammed them together.

Score: 8/10

There's a lot of love for Hugo out there; see this review from Kim at Empire. Not everyone enjoyed it, and there are some fair points raised regarding the tonal inconsistencies in this review from Andrea Phillips.