REVIEW: HUGO
Directed by Martin Scorcese
Starring Asa Butterfield, Chloe Grace Moretz, Ben Kingsley and Sacha Baron Cohen
Let me start off with this. If you love movies, if for you film is, it’s core, an art medium that transports you to the most wonderful adventures and beautiful stories- then you owe it to yourself to watch Hugo.
Now secondly.. the trailer of this movie sucks. It seemed as if it realized this was a film of incredible depth, beauty and boundless imagination- and it couldn’t allow that to happen. So it marketed it as a simple child’s adventure (which it is) but in a most mundane and unremarkable way. Had the name Martin Scorcese flashed in that trailer, I would never have given this film a second thought.
But I did, and so should you. For a master filmmaker of Scorcese’s caliber, one would think he’d seen everything- but this may very well be his most unique film to date-unlike any other he has ever crafted- a film that feels straight from his heart and soul.
Hugo is a wonderment of a film, a child’s view of a world gone broken. Set in an almost steam-punk past, this movie flows beautifully and with ease between it’s characters and the poetic beauty of it’s images. Scorcese’s mastery is easily at work, and to any film buffs it is just a joy to watch the director’s almost child-like control of the story, from cleverly executed shot progressions to the very foundations of film-making. Any film student would do well to watch the film closely.
But what really sets it apart is how much heart this movie has. It is a story of finding one’s true calling, of fixing what is broken and from never forgetting that our darkest pain is a path to finding home.
But what I did not expect was that this movie was, as well, an ode to film, and the dreams it weaves. From the first films of Lumiere brothers to, my large surprise, an ode to the surrealist works of filmmaking master George Melies, this is a movie about the heart of movies.
“It’s like dreaming in the daytime”, one character would say, and I struggle to find any film that captures the whimsical beauty of film’s early years. The simplicity of the filmmaker’s craft of yesteryear is ironically portrayed in this modern 3D format, a format that I had never thought Martin Scorcese as being one to use, being a classical master himself. But leave it to him to execute the 3D in a way that may be, for the first time since it’s inception, a medium for artistic beauty rather than technical beauty.
Perhaps what I loved most about this movie is that it left me feeling hopeful, and in love once again with the medium. It’s not that I’ve ever fallen out of love, but once in a while a film comes along and pushes you to dream even further, to realize that your imagination too is boundless, and that if you have ever forgotten what passion is- all you need is a bit of tinkering to help fix you back to what you’re supposed to do.
10/10
