30 for 30 — 2011: "Hugo"
"If you've ever wondered where your dreams come from, you look around...this is where they're made."
What’s this all about? I turned 30 on Sept. 26, 30 days from the start of this series. To celebrate, I’m watching one movie a day for 30 days and spending 30 minutes writing about each one. This post is about 2011. Click here for the original newsletter in the series. Other entries: 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010
Hello! Obviously, this is a lot later than I intended. Between birthday celebrations, a new work schedule change and everything else going on, I got distracted and wasn’t able to keep up the schedule I set for myself with these newsletters. But I’m starting back up again with this one, and will continue to publish on a semi-regular basis. Thanks for reading!
Now, on to “Hugo.”
Martin Scorsese makes the news these days more for his thoughts on Marvel movies than he does for the movies he makes — er, I mean, the pictures he makes. Ol’ Marty has a talent for pissing off MCU fanatics by saying that comic book films are all the same movie made over and over. His detractors counter with the argument that Scorsese makes the same, old-man mob movie over and over: “Goodfellas,” “Casino,” “The Irishman,” “Wolf of Wall Street,” etc.
Those detractors 1) are wrong, and 2) have clearly never seen “Hugo.”
“Hugo,” for those who haven’t seen it, is about young Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), who lives inside the walls of a train station clock tower in Paris in 1931. He’s an orphan. He lost his father (Jude Law) in a fire, and his mother has been dead for a while. He spends his days manning the clock tower in his dad’s stead so that the train station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) doesn’t learn that he’s an orphan and force him to live with his alcoholic uncle (Ray Winstone). (I know this sounds depressing. It gets better.) When he’s not avoiding truancy, Hugo steals for his supper and steals mechanical parts to finish working on the automaton his father was building before his death, convinced his father left him one last message amid all the gears and dials.
When Hugo gets caught stealing from the owner of the train station toy shop (Ben Kingsley), he embarks on an artistic journey that puts him in contact with the beginnings of film history, and helps him find out more about his dad and that automaton along the way.
This is one of my favorite Scorsese movies. I saw this for the first time in a college film class all about the director. On the first day of class, the professor asked us to write down a list of every Scorsese film we’d ever seen, so that she could figure out how to shape the curriculum. Most of us had seen the big stuff- “The Departed,” “Goodfellas,” “Shutter Island,” “Shark Tale.” The ones everybody had seen the least were films like “Hugo,” “The Last Temptation of Christ,” “Taxi Driver” and “The Age of Innocence.”
“Hugo” was one of the first films we watched, and it was incredible to see something that was such a fawning appreciation of film. For the train station toy shop owner is actually French film director Georges Méliès, the director who helped pioneer the film medium as we know it today. His “A Trip to the Moon” is the first known example of science fiction in film and it was the first widely-seen film to utilize special effects — a hand-colored print discovered in 1993 is one of the earliest uses of color in the medium.
The real-life Méliès went bankrupt shortly after World War I after a lucrative financial and distribution deal with Pathé Studios went bad. He burned down most of his own film negatives in 1923 out of protest toward Pathé’s takeover of his old studio. It wasn’t until the late 1920s that his career was reassessed by journalists and film historians who sought to preserve his work and pass on his contributions to the medium of film.
“Hugo” imagines Méliès in that in-between phase of his life, after his wife died and he went bankrupt. He’s a bitter, frustrated man. He lives with his second wife and raises his granddaughter Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz). Hugo, after learning who exactly Papa Georges is (that’s what Isabelle calls him), searches for more people who were impacted by his work, and in doing so, finds some of the missing keys to his father’s automaton.
Scorsese and cinematographer Robert Richardson shot the whole movie in 3D. “Hugo” came out in 2011, when 3D movies were still undergoing another surge of popularity, but this is one of the few films to have a reason to use that technology. Scorsese pays tribute to the real Méliès several times, and uses the 3D effects and modern film technology to move the story along instead of merely using them as window-dressing. The lighting is mostly washed-out, giving the film an old, grainy, dreamlike feel — all the better to capture Hugo’s childlike wonder and the wonder most must have felt at seeing Méliès’ films for the first time.
It’s fitting that Scorsese would direct this movie. When he’s not directing or producing, he’s leading film preservation efforts around the world, working to restore old films and highlighting new work from international filmmakers. He’s the perfect director to helm a film about film history, appreciation and preservation and the dangers of losing art that came before us. Much like my look at “The Sandlot,” this is also a movie about preserving legends and remembering the names of those from the past.
And while “Hugo” is a wonder to look at technically, it’s also incredibly emotional, proving that you can have all the bells and whistles, all the 3D and colored prints and new technology in the world, but all of that means nothing if there’s no heart and soul behind it. And Hugo helps Papa Georges find his heart again, while Papa Georges literally helps Hugo find the heart for his robotic man. In fact, everyone in “Hugo” is just looking for love in one way or another, even the station inspector. And, through the magic of film, they all find it.
Up next: We’re going deep with the father-and-son epic triptych of 2012’s “The Place Beyond the Pines.”
Letter of Recommendation
Like I said before, Scorsese makes more than mob movies. In no particular order, here are some of my favorite movies he’s made that have nothing to do with wiseguys or gangsters:
“The Last Temptation of Christ”
“The Age of Innocence”
“After Hours”
“The Color of Money”
“Kundun”
“Shutter Island”
“The King of Comedy”
“The Aviator”
“Italianamerican”
“New York, New York”
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