Hugo

A lot of people still react with surprise when they hear Scorsese has made a children’s film. But it’s been a very long time since Goodfellas and Casino, and he’s amply proven his versatility since. And this ought to bring home to a wider audience that he can make interesting, stylistically superb films with great affection. I suspect this’ll be the best film this Xmas.

Based on what looks like an awesome mixed-media novel, Hugo is the story of a little boy who lives in a fanciful version of Gare Montparnasse, with a grandiose façade and a tower, winding the clocks and evading the station inspector, who will send him to the orphanage if he realises his drunken uncle is no longer there to do his job. His father, a watchmaker, left him just one thing – a large automaton – and though he gathers parts to try to get it working, it needs a special key. He gets in trouble trying to steal from a toymaker, who in turn takes from him his father’s notebook. But what is in the notebook makes the toymaker hesitate, and his pretty young daughter has a very distinctive key about her neck…

All I knew going into Hugo was that it was suitable for kids, that it looked quite steampunk-ish on the poster and that somewhere along the line the Lumière brothers and Georges Méliès were involved, names familiar from my master’s degree. And indeed, this film made me glad to have got that rather useless qualification, because there was a lot of familiar stuff here. The story revolves around a fanciful version of Méliès’ life (somewhat oddly pronounced with the ‘s’ voiced here), both triumphs and tragedies exaggerated to make for a good yarn, and this allows Scorsese to not only recreate the fun setpieces of Méliès’ best (and Le Voyage dans la lune remains my very favourite piece of pre-Expressionist film footage, with its tumblers and funny effects), but to put in references to other films and famous scenes, from melding that famous the Montparnasse disaster with echoes of both Jean Renoir and the Lumière train film (and of course I had to duck away when the actual film was played, just before the onscreen audience did, in accordance with the popular urban myth) to a scene that will definitely bring to mind The 39 Steps. He even inserted Helen McRory (one of several Harry Potter cast members in this film) into original Méliès footage! Part of the love for film here seems to be Scorsese’s own.

The cast is excellent. The children are the centre of it all, of course, and do superbly – the boy playing Hugo was adorable and will make an interesting Ender. The girl – who I only later realised was Hitgirl from Kickass – was both tomboyish and feminine and managed to pull off that tired character quirk of proudly using long words because she’s bookish. Kingsley is reliably superb and ought to do more roles like this. Sasha Baron Cohen will no doubt see his stature further rise from this – he popped up in Sweeney Todd but a lot of people still don’t think of him as an actor who will appear in other people’s films. Here, he manages loathsome, ridiculous and appealing, no mean feat. McRory, Jude Law and Christopher Lee are strong in their small roles, and though reports are conflicting, I’m convinced that was Johnny Depp putting in a cameo as the guitar player.

One slightly odd point was that when Hugo put his hair in a side-parting, he looked remarkably like a friend of ours. Which had us laughing at certain points! Overall, though, this was a superb little film and the first in many years that has actually made me interested in the video game tie-in.