Kids’ movies are usually aimed at parents. Parents are, generally speaking, exhausted. Which means a movie like Hugo is always going to be up against that. So let’s make it simple: yes, it’s directed by Martin Scorsese, who isn’t exactly known for his “fun for all ages” approach to movie-making. Yes, it is to some extent about the early days of movie-making, which is the kind of ultra-specific topic that makes audiences wary of reviewers who talk it up (after all, who’s going to love a big-budget look at the early days of film-making more than people obsessed with film). Yes, it is in 3D and does run over two hours. And if any of that is enough to scare you off, that’s your loss, because you’ll be missing one of the most magical movies to come along in ages.
It’s 1920s Paris, and lurking in the bowels of the city’s main train station is Hugo (Asa Butterfield) a young boy who divides his time between manually winding all the stations’ clocks and trying to repair a strange clockwork figure. Conveniently for us, all this running around and peering out at things from behind clock faces does an excellent job of setting up who’s who and what’s what at the station, most notably that Hugo has to stay out of the clutches of the station inspector (Sasha Baron Cohen), who seems to delight in throwing excess children into a police van bound for the nearest orphanage.
Caught trying to steal spare parts by a toymaker (Ben Kingsley) who has a stall at the station, Hugo ends up befriending Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz), who seems to be the toymaker’s granddaughter. He teaches her about the wonder of movies by sneaking her in to see the Harold Lloyd comedy Safety Last; she teaches him about the power of books by taking him to meet crusty bookseller Monsieur Labisse (Christopher Lee). Gradually she teases out Hugo’s backstory: his father (Jude Law) was a museum worker who died in a fire, then his drunken uncle (Ray Winstone) brought him to the station to help with his clock-winding job and promptly vanished. His father was trying to repair the clockwork figure before he died, and Hugo thinks (though he knows it’s crazy) that if he can repair the automation it will deliver a message from his dead father.
This is exactly the kind of tragic story that gets like Isabelle on side, and one of this film’s many delights is the way that the plot ticks along like one of the station’s massive clocks. Each mystery has its own logical, satisfying solution that points to the next stage in the story, and along the way just about everyone is revealed to be more than what they seemed. Suffice to say the toymaker has a deeper and much sadder past than first suspected, and while it’s not exactly a spoiler to reveal he has something to do with the earliest days of motion pictures, exactly how it pans out is both heart-wrenching and ultimately uplifting (and it’s based on a true story). Bring tissues and plenty of them would be my advice, it’s awfully hard to enjoy the 3D effects while wiping away tears.
While the performances are excellent right down to the smallest roles – Butterfield is a real star here, while Kingsley will break your heart – Cohen is a surprise and a delight, proving he doesn’t have to be pranking gullible Americans to get laughs. Scorsese takes great care in giving us an entire community inside the train station, and seeing the way that the many supporting characters’ individual small stories play out in and around Hugo’s bigger adventures is yet another of this films many joys.
Hugo is Scorsese’s first film in 3D and he uses it brilliantly, giving a real sense of space to the station and its many shops and hidden spaces without resorting to the usual cheap 3D tricks – until he does, at which point it’s clear that they’re not merely tricks. He’s pointing back to the earliest days of cinema when movies were designed primarily to startle and amaze and showing how the magic and sense of wonder those films had can still work today. This film is a blatant love letter to those early days of cinema, but it celebrates them as something alive, made by people who wanted to entertain and enthral. Scorsese extends this love of cinema to his own effort, filling it to the brim and then some with everything you could possibly want in a film. Kids have adventures, grown-ups fall in love, there are close shaves and narrow escapes and adventures under the sea and a movie studio made entirely of glass; what’s not to like?
Five stars