U.S.: Martin Scorsese, 2011 

All of this is seen, with Citizen Kane clarity and depth, through the eyes of 12-year-old Hugo, a Dickensian orphan leading a hard knocks life in the station. while secretly running the works in the walls — the boy who finds Melies, among his toys. (The real-life Melies, of course, after he lost his movie studio, really did have a toyshop in the train station.) 

The union of the two is inevitable. Hugo was robbed of his childhood when his horologist father (Jude Law) died, leaving him the weird but bewitching legacy of an automaton that writes. Hugo’s drunken uncle Claude (Ray Winstone), then the station’s timekeeper, took him into Montparnasse, and taught him all about time. Then he died too, leaving Hugo, all alone, to run the clocks (unbeknownst, it seems to the stationmasters). And Melies, an extraordinarily gifted man, who was writer, designer, director and even star actor in most of those 500 films, was robbed of his artistic career, and even forced, to dismantle his movie studio (the world‘s first), and destroy his own films because of changing public tastes and the machinations of the clever businessmen who robbed him and others blind. 

It was one of the early tragedies of world cinema. Given the early piratical and later tyrannical practices of the business types who took over the movies, and who made obsessive artists like Melies subordinate to their main goals (money and more money), how could it not be? 

Scorsese’s movie, the purest expression ever of the director’s passionate love of the cinema, shows us — SPOILER ALERT be damned — how both the fleet urchin inventor Hugo and the bearded, bespectacled magician/movie-man Melies regain what they lost. 

There are others in the story of course, other denizens and habitués of the Gare. There is Melies’ plucky god-daughter Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz), who becomes Hugo’s station angel and movie going buddy, and Melies’ wife, beaming Mama Jeanne (Helen McCrory), the studious looking Lisette (film noir lover/actress Emily Mortimer), a fictional Emily (Frances de la Tour), who has a little dachshund, and Emily‘s rotund boyfriend M. Frick (Richard Griffiths, who looks like he was born for a silent movie, and a pie in his face) and, most dangerously the tyrannical station inspector (played with an edge by Sacha Baron Cohen), a WWI veteran with a prosthetic leg, a stickler who chases Hugo and other orphans all around the station. 

And there’s another character from outside the station group: the film lover, academic and Melies admirer Rene Tabard, played by Michael Stuhlbarg, who played the Job figure in the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man. 

Scorsese is a master director of actors, but usually in rougher, tougher, fouler-talking urban milieus. Here he and his actors go for the larger-than-life fairytale quality that Spielberg or Jean-Pierre Jeunet or Robert Zemeckis have mastered — and in fact, Hugo often suggests what Jeunet’s Amelie may have been like, if Spielberg had directed it, and if Amelie had been played not by Audrey Tautou, but by Zazie dans le Metro (the little gamin who, come to think of it, sounded and swore something like a Scorsese mean streets character). 

It’s not Scorsese’s milieu, and in a way, not even his style, but you can tell how much the material means to him, how much the cinema means to him. Because of all that, Hugo is easily one of the most personal movies he’s ever made. Mean Streets and Goodfellas show us his real world, and the world around that world. Hugo shows us the world of his dreams, the world of the movies. 

Hugo was based on the children’s book by Brian Selznick (yes, it’s that Selznick family)  “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” (a better film title, by the way, than Hugo) and the screenwriter was John Logan, of The Aviator, Gladiator and Rango. With its child’s perspective on a child’s fantasy world, it’s the first movie of its kind that Scorsese has ever done — unless you want to count the boy’s-eye view he used in his classic mother-son road movie, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. But Alice was , at bottom, a realistic movie, while Hugo is a great rich fever dream a movie that suggests the kind of wild spree Spielberg would have made out of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s lush French farce Amelie, if the screen character Amelie were 12 years old, and more like Louis Malle’s Zazie dans le Metro than Audrey Tautou. 

Yet its also pure Scorsese, and quite clearly one of the most personal movies he‘s ever made. 

Movie-loving, it seems to me, especially the intense kind that Scorsese demonstrates in this film and in his many film preservation ventures, is one of the most prodigal and rich of all artistic obsessions — since the movies are the art that can embrace not only all the world, but all the arts and entertainments and people in the world. To make a movie like Hugo, to pay such extravagant, but well-deserved, tribute to the great Georges Melies (Ben Kingsley lets the character swallow him up) is to show, in many ways, a universal artistic love for that world and all its (best) works. 

Melies, who began his show business career as one of Paris’ best stage magicians, was a man who made both magic and the movies, triumphed in both, lost both, and regained both. He would have probably been touched that today you can buy a set with over 170 of his films (from Criterion) and play it in your homes on anoher magical invention. He would have been touched too by Hugo, I‘m sure, as I was. It’s my favorite film this year. How could it not be?

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