Martin Scorsese (2011)
Hugo is in many ways a magical film – the first 3D movie I’ve seen where the effects are often exciting and just as remarkable at the end as they were at the beginning. Yet the performances are excruciating and the picture is winning awards for the wrong reasons: because the material is wholesome and the story is (meant to be) heartwarming, and because it’s a great film-maker’s homage to the early years of cinema and to one of its founding fathers – a further public proof of Martin Scorsese’s deep love of the medium and its history. Actors are often honoured when they’re cast against type or appear in heavy disguise and the same may apply to Scorsese here. Hugo is a personal film in the sense that we know – in advance – that the subject matter means a great deal to him. It’s a piece of self-expression to the extent that you often see the hand of a master director in the images on screen, especially in the way those images move. But Scorsese doesn’t express himself through the characters or the story – or in the thoroughgoing innocuousness of the piece. If he continues winning Best Director prizes for Hugo it will be because he’s turned himself into Steven Spielberg for the occasion. (Spielberg’s own award-winning career is a reverse illustration of the same syndrome: denied the Oscar he deserved for ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, he won for the ‘grown-up’ dramas Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan.) But Scorsese doesn’t appear to have the easy, natural sympathy for childhood Spielberg showed in ET. The texture of innocence in Hugo feels strained; that goes for most of the light-hearted moments too.
Like Elliott in ET, Hugo Cabret, the boy hero of Scorsese’s film, is fatherless (unlike Elliott, he’s motherless too). Hugo is from a family of horologists. His adored father, whom we see in a flashback, is a clockmaker and a film fanatic – he loves especially the films of Georges Méliès. He teaches his son the skills of his trade and takes him to the cinema. When his father dies in a museum fire, Hugo goes to live in the rafters of the Gare Montparnasse, among the machinery of the station clocks which his reprobate uncle Claude is responsible for maintaining. Claude is too drunk most of the time to do his job, which devolves to his nephew. Hugo lives a hand to mouth existence, stealing food from shops on the station; as well as keeping the clocks going, he works every day on a cherished, unfinished project of his father’s: to repair an automaton – a mechanical man designed to write with a pen. Elsewhere on the Gare Montparnasse is a booth where an elderly, irritable man sells toys and confectionery. The screenplay by John Logan is based on Brian Selznick’s 2007 novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret and the character of Hugo is an invention but the curmudgeon who runs the toyshop turns out to be Georges Méliès and this is what really happened to him after his films stopped being popular and his studio went bankrupt, in the second decade of the twentieth century. You can see why the stranger-than-fiction material was irresistible to Scorsese, who bought the film rights to Selznick’s book shortly after its publication: the themes of repair and rediscovering things that were thought lost – Méliès’s films, as well as his celebrity – are essential to the story. That broken mechanical man, which Hugo’s father found by chance, once belonged to Méliès’s collection of automata.
The automaton, with its quiet benignity and sad smile, gives the best performance in Hugo, followed by a trio of dogs. Scorsese has been quoted as saying:
‘I found 3D to be really interesting, because the actors were more upfront emotionally. Their slightest move, their slightest intention is picked up much more precisely.’
That last bit may well be true but what is picked up in most cases is artificiality, which has an emotionally distancing effect. Except for Jude Law, who is warm and natural in his brief appearance as Hugo’s father, and (to my surprise) Christopher Lee, as a bookshop owner, the human actors are mechanical: you can see the wheels turning as they prepare their effects. This is especially true of the two fourteen-year-olds who play Hugo and Isabelle, the goddaughter of the toyshop owner. Asa Butterfield and Chloe Grace Moretz are both already experienced performers, and it shows in a bad way. These children are knowing: they mimic being wonderstruck or distressed or fearful but never convince you that they feel any of these things. Asa Butterfield’s eyes are a remarkable blue but he seems a limited actor; Moretz, although her condescending quality is more annoying, looks as if she might be capable of more. As Méliès, Ben Kingsley gives a pompous, similarly unfelt performance – like the kids, he’s utterly unmoving.
Scorsese has worked with plenty of British actors in his previous films but Hugo is not only his first 3D movie but the first time he’s directed a predominantly British cast. The only Americans in significant roles are Moretz (who handles an English accent comfortably) and Michael Stuhlbarg (as the French film historian René Tabard). If the characters had been American, I can’t believe Scorsese would have got the accomplished but hollow playing he gets from the likes of Helen McCrory (as Méliès’s ex-leading lady and loyal wife), Emily Mortimer (as a flower seller on the station) and Ray Winstone (as Uncle Claude). Frances de la Tour and Richard Griffiths are relatively relaxed as tentative, late-middle-aged sweethearts but they’re asked to go through the same routine repeatedly and their awareness of this shows. Perhaps Scorsese’s admiration for Powell and Pressburger somehow got in the way and blinded him into thinking the acting in the Archers’ movies is British film acting par excellence. But that wouldn’t explain or excuse Sacha Baron-Cohen, as the war-wounded station inspector on the station. Baron-Cohen is talented (you can tell in odd moments, as when Inspector Gustav tries on various smiles) but, as soon as he opens his mouth, all you hear is how funny he thinks he is (and he can’t hold a vocal characterisation here for more than a few lines at a time). Scorsese has ended up with acting that’s neither truthful nor satisfyingly stylised.
Hugo and The Artist have dominated the early awards lists in North America and the coincidence of these two paeans to early cinema in the same year is striking: watching the awkward cast in Hugo, I sometimes thought this too might be better as a silent (or an animated) film. It’s not enough to say that the actors don’t matter although the gulf between the quality of the performances and other elements of the film is so great that you can almost separate them in your mind, and feel that you’re watching two movies. The visual design and rhythm of Hugo really is breathtaking: people and things stand out from the screen and encroach on the audience sometimes beautifully (the repeated falling snowflakes, for example) and sometimes startlingly – linking us to the Parisians who saw the Lumière brothers’ 50-second short L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotats in 1895 and flinched in fear that the train was coming into the cinema. At the very start of Hugo, Robert Richardson’s camera speeds thrillingly down a platform at the Gare Montparnasse; and all the sequences involving trains are pretty breathtaking – whether real or in Hugo’s vivid nightmares. Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing is beautifully sharp, and the art direction and set decoration by Dante Ferretti and Francesca Lo Schiavo are gorgeously detailed. The montages of silent films of Méliès and others are, of course, absorbing and there are some nice resonances – like a clip from a Harold Lloyd film which is picked up in the climax when Hugo is trying to escape the clutches of Inspector Gustav and hanging onto the station clock face for dear life. Scorsese himself makes a momentary, apt appearance as a photographer taking a picture of Méliès and his wife during their film-making heyday.
9 December 2011
