REVIEW: Hugo (dir. Scorsese)

Well, Spielberg can breathe a sigh of relief. Turns out Scorsese can't do his job any more than Spielberg can do Scorsese's (what is it with these directors that they want to morph into one another all the time?). There are those in the higher echelons of the Church of Scorsology who are already denying that his new kid's movie, Hugo, adapted from Brian Selznick's bestselling kid's book, starring kids, and trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey in time for the Christmas audience, is actually for kids at all. It's mind is on higher things — film critics. "This movie is too good for children," Fran Lebowitz has pronounced. What poppycock. Try telling that to the investors that ponied up $170 million so that Scorsese could have the pleasure of swinging his camera up and down and around a Dante-Ferreti-designed Parisian train station, as young Hugo (Asa Butterfield) is chased by the station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) and his Dobermann in fulsome 3-D. But here's the thing: for all the dexterity, you never feel Cohen's fingers on Butterfield's collar, or his breath down his neck, just the sinuous panther-like glide of that camera. Later on, Hugo gets down onto the tracks to look for a key and and by the time the looks up — too late! — the train is upon him. How did that happen? It's a small thing — wouldn't the vibrating rails have alerted him to the oncoming train? in which case what's he still doing on the tracks? in which case solve it — and Hugo is full of such misfires. Slapstick that urgently needs tightening up. Some intermittently funny comic pedantry from Cohen. (You can practically hear clocks chime in the background.) A gumption-filled effort from Chloe Moretz to revivify the ghost of Hayley Mills. Some sentimental business involving a couple of puppies, and some more heartfelt stuff involving Hugo's dead father that seems to leave Scorsese as cold as the automaton at the centre of the story. What made him think that after all this time, he would turn out to be good at sentiment, or slapstick, or suspense, or happy endings and all the other things which he tries here for the first time but which he's spent the best part of three decades proclaiming himself allergic to ("they're sentimental. Lies," he once said of Hollywood blockbusters. "That's the problem. And where I fit in there, I don't know")? What changed his mind? Was it the Oscar? Some critics will doubtless take the film's stiffness as evidence of Scorsese's higher artistry — a sign that he's above such cheap effects. He may well be. He is probably the least manipulative filmmaker working in America. He's a pathological artist, a fantasist of the glandular rather than wish-fulfillment variety, his movies drilling into the side of obsessions which exceed even their maker's understanding, but lacking the fine-tuned antennae for what an audience may be thinking or feeling at any given point. The problem with Hugo comes down to this: for all its production-value dazzle and technological razzmatazz, I just didn't believe that Scorsese felt much for his boy save as a pair of eyes through which to view that fabulous set. We never feel Hugo's hunger, or impoverishment, or loneliness: the picture is too busy and rich and surfeited. Scorsese never thinks "how can I best dramatize my hero's plight?", he thinks "wouldn't it be cool to spin a double-loop figure-of-eight with my camera around that clock-tower?" Hugo lacks the simplicity and emotional directness of a genuine children's classic — The Black Stallion, E.T., Toy Story, Fly Away Home, Spirited Away. Next to those films it feels like a cold marvel, with a view of the human heart as just another piece of clockwork: old Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley), neglected and bitter, will be pulled out of his funk, apparently, by the merest contact with that automaton, which will serve as a reminder that someone once loved his work. Voila! It's a bizarrely mechanical piece of psychology and plotting, gauzier than anything Spielberg or Hitchcock ever tried to pull off. The film warms in the final furlong with some fond revivifications of Méliès films, with Scorsese playing a delighted Prospero to the earliest days of cinema. Finally, Thelma Schoonmaker's editing rhythm quickens (where was she during the chase sequences?) and you feel the pulse of the movie flutter into life, the embers of one filmmaker's work glowing with the breath of another. With its imagery of ash and scattered papers, its dragons and mermaids, the final 25 minutes of this movie form something of a companion piece to Shutter Island, another haunted house suffused with melancholy and mazy with confabulation, bent on exhuming the past and raising the dead. Nobody could deny Scorsese the chance to kick up his heels and enjoy a Lear-With-Flowers-in-His-Hair moment, but can I be the only one uncomfortable with the idea of a bunch of cineastes hijacking a children's entertainment to enjoy a highlight reel of silent cinema's greatest hits*? It's like one of those wooden toys children pretend to like so the adults can feel they're not giving into the commercialisation of Christmas. I'm reminded of the last time the director composed a love letter to the movies — when, head-swollen by his Palme d'Or for Taxi Driver, he ran aground the motiveless magnificence of New York, New York. Hugo is New York, New York for Pokemonites. My inner child sat drumming his fingers throughout. C+

* A rhetorical question. Most cineastes are completely okay with this idea.