HUGO

Hugo is Martin Scorsese's love-letter to the movies, both within the plot, and through the sheer craft of the movie itself.

Wide-eyed Asa Butterfield, who last broke my heart in the devastating Boy in the Striped Pajamas, now uses his expressive baby-blues to great effect as Hugo, an orphan who lives in a 1930's bustling train station. Hugo is a little ruffian who fixes the clocks in a busy train station in Paris. He scurries through vents, leaps through turning machinery, and crawls down ladders in order to keep the clockwork running. Except that no one knows he is there. The Station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), with his trusty Doberman Pinscher at his side, it out to clean up the station by rounding up these street orphans and sending them to an orphanage, but wily Hugo always evades his grasp.

In Hugo's secret lair in the station, there are remnants of a happier life, when he lived with his clockmaker father (Jude Law), who died in a museum fire. Hugo's most treasured possession is an automaton that his father found, dusted over in the back room at the museum. The automaton is an odd, early industrial sort of robot, whose insides are made of clockwork machinery, and whose hand is poised, pen in hand, ready to write a message. If Hugo can just gather all the right pieces together and fix the automaton, he somehow feels that it will connect him to his dead father.

Though the film's advertising seems to portray Hugo as an action-adventure kiddie movie about a magical robot, the automaton is only one piece of this rich, visual story. Other characters include Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz), a girl who befriends Hugo at the station; Isabelle's "Papa" Georges (Ben Kingsley), an angry, sad man who runs a toy booth at the station; Monsieur Labisse (Christopher Lee), a towering figure who owns a bookshop where dusty tomes are literally piled to the ceiling; and the station florist Lisette (Emily Mortimer), whom the Station Inspector secretly pines for.

Hugo is filmed in gorgeous golden sepia tones, with the camera zooming in a out of clockworks, tunnels, and crowds. It is one of the few newfangled 3D movies where the three dimensionality is such an integral part of the cinematography that you barely notice the gimmick. The thing I noticed, instead, is how utterly immersed I felt in this boy's world almost immediately. I watched Hugo after a crappy day at work, and two hours later as the credits rolled, realized I had been completely inside Hugo's world, almost forgetting where I was when I staggered out of the theater.

Without giving away plot tangents which slowly unfurl, I want to emphasize that Hugo is a movie for film-lovers. It is marketed as a kids' movie (it may actually be a bit slow-moving for restless children), but I almost think it is more for adults. There is a rich sentimentality in the film, plus an ever-present feeling of melancholy of holding onto the past.  Through Hugo's eyes, we find ourselves wistful for times when things seemed simpler, easier, and more innocent... when things could be simply be "fixed" if they were broken.

Hugo is Martin Scorsese's love-letter to the movies, both within the plot, and through the sheer craft of the movie itself. He has painted this story with a sort of attention to detail that often seems thrown away these days, from the ever-present score, to the gorgeous cinematography. You can sense that this story is close to Scorsese's heart, and that feeling will lift you right out of the theater after the credits roll.