![]() ![]() Scorsese's active campaigning for film preservation powers one of the key subplots: Papa Georges' past. While watching “Hugo,” it is difficult to avoid thinking of the adventurous failure of Robert Zemeckis' past decade of motion-capture filmmaking: had Zemeckis only employed real humans within his digital creations, films such as “The Polar Express” and “A Christmas Carol” might have attained the sense of pure wonder that pervades Scorsese's “Hugo.” Scorsese deploys 3-D in order to draw the audience into Hugo's world rather than pushing it toward them, and the expanse of Gare Montparnasse and the city surrounding seem both realistic and utterly magical. Isabelle enthuses constantly on literature and displays a wordsmith's vocabulary, and the two children form a bond as they unravel the mystery of the automaton and the illustrious history of Papa Georges.įirst, behold the technical marvel of “Hugo,” a film in which 3-D technology and computer-generated graphics serve to create a historic Paris of the mind's eye, a place that feels alternately unreal and nearly tangible. Georges keeps everything, but his young daughter Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz) takes pity on Hugo. Georges forces Hugo to empty his pockets, the contents of which include a notebook containing his father's plans for restoring the automaton. In one of his pilfering adventures, Hugo attracts the ire of Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley), a bitter old man who runs a small toy shop in the station. But after his father's death, Hugo was left to an alcoholic uncle (Ray Winstone) and forced to live within the walls of the station, stealing and foraging food from the vendors and dodging the comically self-important station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen). His late father (Jude Law) was a master clockmaker who maintained the ornate, suspended clocks of the station and spent free time trying to restore an automaton, a human-shaped robot that ran on clock machinery and was thrown out by one of the local museums. ![]() But “Hugo” is illuminated by many of the director's long-held passions, and as his first foray into 3-D, it is mastery of the form, an integration of the technology into the film rather than an attention-getting scheme.īased on Brian Selznick's 2007 young readers' novel “The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” a genre-bending work that incorporated elements of graphic novels, flipbooks, picture books and conventional narrative, “Hugo” follows the saga of Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), a young orphan living in Paris' Gare Montparnasse train station in the early 1920s. ![]() “Hugo” might seem like a departure point for Martin Scorsese, a director who rarely steps out of his tough, R-rated cinematic neighborhood and, up to this quite wondrous film, never directed a movie that speaks to all ages in the modern language of computer-assisted filmmaking. ![]()
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