Age of innocence
GoodFellas director Martin Scorsese shows a soft side in Hugo, the film adaptation of Brian Selznick’s graphic novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, cleaves so closely to this recipe, it would be momentous if even one second of the plot were able to catch you by surprise. It does not.
Hugo (the impossibly saucer-eyed Asa Butterfield) lives in the walls of a Parisian train station (circa 1930), surreptitiously winding the giant clocks so no one will know his caretaker-uncle has disappeared and send Hugo to an orphanage. He scavenges food and supplies from shops in the station, eventually getting caught by Georges (Ben Kingsley), a curmudgeonly tinkerer and toy salesman. Georges has a secret (in this genre, everyone has a secret that could be easily told, except it wouldn’t leave any mystery; it’s borne of an WASPy sense of emotional repression and a desire to allow the plot to stretch out), so Hugo enlists Georges’ ward Hermione… er, Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz) to help him retrieve the notebook the man took from him.
The notebook, of course, is just another storytelling device (the McGuffin) that ultimately proves irrelevant, as so much of Hugo is. The film’s real goal is to stand as a paean to the silent film era, and especially the work of pioneering French filmmaker Georges Melies.
And that’s where Hugo begins to get interesting.
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