Hugo

"If you ever wonder where your dreams come from, look around: this is where they're made"

Martin Scorsese has produced a film that comes from the bottom of his heart and will become a staple and a standard for children's movies for years to come. I know that I'm more passionate about movies than most, but at the risk of sounding cliched, Hugo is simply magical. Hidden within Scorsese's foray into big-budget, 3D family movies is a love for cinema and their history that seems to burst from the story of little, orphaned Hugo Cabret.

Hugo and his father were once clockmakers and tinkerers, but with his father's untimely death Hugo finds himself alone and searching for purpose. He roams the scaffolding and rafters of the Paris train station maintaining the clocks, constantly tweaking and oiling the cogs and the tiniest levers. In the midst of his realm of steam and iron, Hugo is working to complete an childlike automaton discovered by his late father. He moves methodically, searching for the final pieces to activate his father's machine, hoping for a message from the grave. 

The final component of the mechanical man is a heart-shaped key, which Hugo finds around the neck of Isabelle, the precocious and verbose daughter of the grumpy toymaker Papa Georges. The automaton's revelation leads Isabelle and Hugo on an adventure that ultimately results in their discovery that Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley) is really Georges Melies. A tragic but elegant story of forgotten dreams unfolds in a series of flashbacks through the flicker of a hand-wound camera. Melies, a real-life pioneer in cinema, is shown joyfully creating and directing his fantastical films with this wife and co-star by his side. He then relates how attitudes changed after the Great War and how people no longer had the light hearts for his wondrous pictures. Before his eyes, his precious films were melted down and used to make cheap high heeled shoes, their clatter on the station floor a constant reminder of his failure. 

In real life, Georges Melies was a great filmmaker who had his work and its profits stolen by Thomas Edison and really did end up as a poor toymaker. It was only years after being driven out of business that Melies was recognized by critics and fans alike for his great contribution to cinema. Martin Scorsese has certainly experienced a different career arc and when he is not making great films, he is working passionately at film preservation, including Melies' early work. Scorsese's masterful storytelling has typically come with an R rating, but in Hugo he succeeds in weaving his passion for the history of film into this beautifully designed children's story.  

Visually, the film is stunning. The camera works from a child's angle as much as possible, following Hugo through an iron maze of tunnels, or bumping and shoving through crowds of oblivious adults in the dusty, sunlit station. As the camera follows Hugo through grates and across catwalks, the audience is pulled through a Steampunk wonderland, an industrial jungle where our diminutive hero seems perfectly at home. What attracted audiences to the silent films of the 20's were the "groundbreaking" special effects and gimmicks that directors like Melies used to wow the audience. In a flashback, Scorsese recreates the legendary moment in a Lumiere brothers showing when a crowd dove for cover during a clip showing a train rushing towards the camera. So much has changed in a century, and Hugo's exquisite sets, sharp CGI, and fluid camerawork showcase the best of what movies can be in the 21st century. The silver screen continues to capture audiences, and Melies' words could just as easily have come from Scorsese: "If you ever wonder where your dreams come from, look around: this is where they're made." 

I said earlier that Hugo was magical, and I really can't think of a better word to describe it. Infinitely deeper than the other garbage produced for children (ie Happy Feet 2), Hugo has great depth and beauty that will engage both children and adults alike. The story has a simple but exhilarating emotional appeal to it and I, not typically a fan of kids movies, grinned and laughed my way through one of the best films I've seen in a long time.

It's playful, its fantastic, and I guarantee you will love it