In Hugo, Martin Scorsese has hired himself a bunch of A-plus-list artists and techies, and together they’ve crafted a deluxe, gargantuan train-set of a movie in which the director and his 3-D camera can whisk and whizz and zig and zag and show off all his expensive toys — and wax lyrical on the magic of movies.
The source is Brian Selznick’s illustrated novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which takes place in 1930 and centers on an orphaned 12-year-old, played in the film by Asa Butterfield, who lives in a flat in the bowels of the Paris station.
Hugo’s drunken uncle, until he went missing, had the job of setting the station’s clocks, so now the boy, to cover for the disappearance and stay out of the orphanage, does the job in secret, stealing through tunnels, up rickety ladders and over catwalks, careful to avoid Sasha Baron Cohen’s stationmaster with his relish for orphan-catching.
For a while, Hugo’s only company is a semi-complete automaton, a kind of primitive mechanical man that his late machinist dad (Jude Law, seen in flashback) discovered in a museum storage area. Hugo thinks the automaton holds the key to his future; alas, the key it doesn’t hold is the one that would wind it up and set it in motion.
Scorsese, working from a shapely script by John Logan, is hell-bent on bedazzling us. He and production designer Dante Ferretti pack the screen with clocks and gears and cogs and other round objects that also evoke the film canisters that show up later, when pioneer fantasy filmmaker Georges Melies turns up as a character.