'Hugo' is a clockwork homage
Asa Butterfield plays Hugo Cabret in "Hugo" directed by Martin Scorsese, from Paramount Pictures and GK Films. Credit: Paramount Pictures
Harry Potter goes to the Cinémathèque Française in "Hugo," a fantasy-adventure from Martin Scorsese that also doubles as a crash course in film studies. Movie buffs will revel in its poetic re-creation of the early days of cinema, though whether young viewers will also feel the magic remains a question.
The film is based on Brian Selznick's Caldecott-winning graphic novel, "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," about a young orphan, Hugo (Asa Butterfield), who lives in the walls of a Paris train station in the 1930s. His prize possession, left behind by his clockmaker father (Jude Law, briefly), is a broken mechanical mannequin that, tantalizingly, holds a pen. Hugo tinkers with it, hoping to someday read its message.
A local toy seller, Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley), has a mysterious connection to the automaton but won't say what. Hugo seeks help from Georges' goddaughter, Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz, charming), and together they begin to suspect that Papa is actually Georges Méliès, the real-life cinematic pioneer whose brilliant short films -- more than 500 in all -- have mostly vanished.
Scorsese, as much a film scholar as a filmmaker, is clearly in love with this fact-based fancy. "Hugo" mixes modern 3-D effects with century-old techniques like iris shots and multiple exposures, and it brims with joy when re-creating Méliès' charmingly inventive sets and props. Kingsley makes an appealingly avuncular Méliès, and Helen McCrory is touching as his wife and favorite actress, Jeanne d'Alcy.
To keep things moving, "Hugo" includes several chase scenes (Sacha Baron Cohen plays an almost too-menacing Station Inspector), but its real purpose is to re-establish movies as the locus of young fantasies (and to stealthily promote the preservation efforts of Scorsese's Film Foundation). That's a worthy goal, even if "Hugo" may appeal more to your inner child than to the real one sitting next to you.
PLOT In 1930s Paris, a young boy discovers a forgotten link to the creation of cinema.
RATING PG (mild innuendo, some scarey scenes)
CAST Ben Kingsley, Chloe Grace Moretz, Asa Butterfield
LENGTH 2:06
PLAYING AT Area theaters, some in 3-D and IMAX
BOTTOM LINE An entertaining if slightly scholarly fantasy-adventure that may appeal mostly to older children and movie buffs.
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