The Invention of Georges Méliès

It has by now become a tired cliche to say that persons with abnormally orange skin, whether from the over-liberal application of self tanner or digital color correction on the part of a movie studio, resemble Oompa-Loompas. However, it was just this comparison that occurred to me during the otherwise visually thrilling opening sequence of Hugo, for Asa Butterfield in the titular role, with his diminutive stature and his mop of untidy brown hair and his musty tweed jacket and his corduroy shorts and his green and red horizontally striped sweater and his digitally enhanced bright orange skin, resembles nothing so much as one of Willy Wonka's vertically challenged crew of all singing, all dancing indentured servants. Certainly not a human, at any rate.

"Come with me, and you'll be, in a world of anal penetration..."

If this is not the sort of thing that bothers you, well, then I envy you, imaginary internet reader, for a considerable obstacle has been removed from your path to the enjoyment of many an otherwise fine and entertaining film. If, however, like my girlfriend and I you are irrationally offended by the representation of a world which has been seemingly drained of every color besides various shades of orange and teal, then Hugo is going to have one very major strike against it from the get-go.

But back to that opening sequence, which I called "otherwise visually thrilling". I am willing to stand by that, for it only took a few seconds of Martin Scorsese's first foray into the world of effects-driven 3D family entertainment to make me realize why my initial horror at what I perceived as the selling out of one of our greatest living directors was actually--to use another tired old cliche--a match made in heaven. You see, I had forgotten that ole Marty was not merely famous for directing gritty and violent movies about potty-mouthed tough guys and the underage prostitutes who love them, but also for shots like this:

And these:

"O ye of little faith," is what I would say to myself of two days ago if I was in possession of some futuristic piece of technology which allowed me to do so (note to NASA: Get on that!), for as it turns out, all these years Martin Scorsese was simply waiting for 3D technology--and 3D technology was waiting for Martin Scorsese. Hugo is far from his best film dramatically, but it is one of his very best films visually, opening with a shot of an intricate system of spinning gears that morphs before our very eyes into the electrically luminescent roadways and skyline of an early 1930's Paris before the camera (or "camera" I suppose I should say) zooms in impossibly fast through the window of a railway station, down a platform crowded with passengers dressed in period attire and obscured by occasional billows of steam, and across the teaming lobby to a giant clock face out of which, through a hole in the shape of the number "4", peer the shockingly blue eyes of our hero.

I found myself reminded more than once over the course of Hugo of its predecessor, 2001's Moulin Rouge!, in which director Baz Luhrmann played with depth of field through digitally enhanced shots of similar scale and kineticism (and which also, as it happens, takes place in Paris). If anything ought to be converted to 3D and re-released in theaters it's that, not James Cameron's bloated whore of an epic Titanic, a trailer for which played before the movie I am reviewing calling it "The World's Most Beloved And Acclaimed Film" (cue exaggerated eye roll).

But back to Hugo. The film is at its best when the camera is moving, which it often is, whether following our hero through a jungle of Parisian legs and coat-tails during one of the film's many chase sequences, or through the clockwork catacombs that are the only home he knows, bequeathed him by his drunken Uncle Claude (Ray Winstone, back under Scorsese's direction after 2006's The Departed), dodging and spinning and flipping right along with its subject.

Conversely, the film is at its worst when the camera is still, trained on two or more actors who are simply standing around discussing one of the film's tiresome magical-realistic plot points--for you see, this is the kind of film where a pretty and precocious older girl befriends the plucky and hardscrabble young hero and--gasp!--that pretty and precocious older girl just happens to be in possession of the missing heart-shaped key required to bring the plucky and hardscrabble young hero's mysterious clockwork automaton to life!

Your grandma will never see it coming.

Now certainly, such stories can be done well. In fact, one of my very favorite films is the 1993 adaptation of The Secret Garden, in which ornate old keys found in long-unopened drawers are discovered to fit the rusty keyholes of ivy-covered doorways as a matter of course. But in the case of Hugo, the director's heart just isn't in it. Scorsese is evidently going through the motions when it comes to all the typical warm-and-fuzzy kiddie-flick mumbo-jumbo about missing keys and hidden doorways and kindly dead fathers, until he can move on to the subject he actually cares about, which, I imagine, is the only reason he took on this project in the first place:

Around the end of the second act, Hugo and his pretty and precocious older companion Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz, a talented actress trying too hard to show what a mature young woman she's grown into on the cusp of this, her necessarily awkward transition from famous child actress to bona fide Hollywood star) learn that the latter's adoptive father, Papa Georges (played with characteristic gravitas by Ben Kingsley, another Scorsese veteran), is actually Georges Méliès, one of the great early silent filmmakers and the "cinemagician" responsible for the invention of the stop trick, as well as countless other special effects innovations before the term "special effects" had even been coined.

Scorsese, who in 1990 founded The Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation and restoration of old films, is one of the most famously cinephilic filmmakers of his generation, and something amazing happens when the movie becomes about Hugo and Isabelle's rediscovery of the work of Georges Méliès: it comes cracklingly, passionately, joyously to life. Gone are the awkward pauses between stilted lines of expository dialogue; gone are the leaden attempts at saccharine humanist sentimentalism; gone even is the formerly ubiquitous binary color scheme (one almost wonders if the earlier oppressiveness of the colors orange and teal was deliberate, a way of drawing attention to today's homogenized artificiality as opposed to the more visually authentic films of Méliès's time; but alas, that is probably giving Scorsese too much credit).

What we are treated to instead is a protracted flashback sequence that is itself a sort of movie-within-a-movie, a biopic of George Méliès that is more compelling, more enlightening and more unreservedly affectionate than any full-length example of that genre to come out in the past decade at least, as the normally unearthly calm and composed Kingsley enthusiastically jogs and hops around the re-created set of one of Méliès's films, directing flamboyantly costumed actors portraying pirates or mermaids or space aliens, negotiating the logistics of having an on-set 8-by-20 foot manned dragon puppet that spews pyrotechnics out of its nose, and just generally being an endearingly mad perfectionist. It is a tribute to the creative process and to the process of creating films in particular, a love letter from one of the greatest living filmmakers to one of his greatest influences, and it is beautiful and thrilling to behold.

In fact, chief among Hugo's accomplishments--maybe it's only real accomplishment--is that it made me want to run right home and watch a George Méliès film.

But something tells me ole Marty would be OK with that.