Movie Summary of Hugo by Michael The Moviegoer.

HUGO = ***

“A Trip To The Movies”

“Hugo” is a movie that operates on two maturity levels. The immature and the sophisticated. Directed by Martin Scorsese like a love story to the birth of cinema, there is a glow about this film that is unlike anything Scorsese has ever done. (It may also be his only movie not to have a budget for fake blood.) “Hugo” is not just a film for children, it’s a film for families. It’s also a real treat for cinemaniacs everywhere.

The young boy Hugo Cabret is played by Asa Butterfield. He lives within the walls of a Paris train station just out of sight of a police inspector played by Sacha Baron Cohen. Their relationship results in the immature part of this film. Their slapstick cat-&-mouse chases take Scorsese out of his comfort zone. The shenanigans never generate the kind of laughs Blake Edwards was always able to achieve with similar shtick. That’s probably because Cohen’s inspector character is off-the-charts weird. It’s never really clear why he likes to chase children through the station. He’s like the child-catcher from “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” only without a purpose.

Hugo is orphaned when his father (Jude Law) dies in a fire. Parents fear not. That scene is probably the tamest and most non-violent un-graphic death scene Scorsese has ever depicted on screen. Hugo’s father was in charge of keeping all the clocks running throughout the station. So Hugo adopts his father’s job under the nose of the unsuspecting inspector.

Eventually, Hugo finds a strange automated man among his father’s things. It’s an oddity that his father rescued from a museum that didn’t want it. Hugo tries to repair it using spare parts he finds around the station. Some of those parts he attempts to steal from a toy shop in the station. When the shop owner (Ben Kingsley) catches him, he takes away the boy’s precious notebook which contains secrets about the automaton.

This is where the film’s tone shifts to the sophisticated. Kingsley’s granddaughter, played by Chloe Grace Moretz, wears a special heart-shaped key on a necklace that can bring Hugo’s automated man to life. When that happens, the mystery of who the toy shop owner is gets revealed. He is the famous French filmmaker Georges Melies.

Georges Melies is widely recognized as one of the founding pioneers of motion pictures, and most notably special effects. He was already an expert stage magician when he became inspired by a camera invented by the Lumiere brothers. At this point Melies became a full-time filmmaker. His most famous film was 1902’s “A Trip To The Moon” which contains an iconic image from early sci-fi of a rocket stuck in the eye of the face of the moon.

Melies made dozens of films, many of which have since been destroyed. His film company and glass studio (which Scorsese lovingly re-creates in “Hugo”) went bankrupt and Melies became a toy salesman in the Montparnasse train station. That’s where Hugo’s story begins.

Scorsese uses this second half of his film to wisely send a cautionary message about film restoration and preservation, a subject that he has always been very passionate about and remains very much involved with.

“Hugo” is being shown in 3D. Never has a movie required 3D less than “Hugo”. This is a movie about movies that are over 100 years old. There’s a great scene of an audience seeing a motion picture for the first time. On the screen is a train entering a station. As the train comes closer, the audience jumps from their seats fearing it might come through the screen and crush them. And they’re watching it in 2D, so for us to see it in 3D just seems ridiculous. Save that extra money and see “Hugo” in standard 2D where offered.

There’s a wonderful wave of nostalgia sweeping through movie theaters this holiday season with “The Artist”, “My Week With Marilyn” and “Hugo”. All three films do a splendid job of lovingly re-creating the past. Scorsese is a real scholar on cinema’s past, and he directs “Hugo” with a certain childlike glee at discovering new toys. Finally, Hugo is left with such inspiration from his relationship with Melies that it’s easy to believe Hugo might one day grow up to become Martin Scorsese.

DVD Double Feature:

In 1979’s “A Little Romance”, a 13-year old Diane Lane is an American girl in Paris who falls in love with a French boy who is fanatically in love with old Hollywood movies. Together they run away to Venice so they can kiss under the Bridge Of Sighs. They are aided by a small-time thief played by Laurence Olivier.

Michael The Moviegoer