Equal opportunity employment in Paris is impressive, no? At the tower at Notre Dame, you got a hunchback working the bells, at Gasteau’s fine French cuisine the head chef is a common rat, and the timekeeper at the train station is a small boy. That boy is Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), a twice orphaned, but strangely honorable waif who does indeed make all the clocks in the station run on time.
Hugo opens with a strafing run down the busy station corridor of a 1930s Parisian train station ending at a pair of eyes peeking through the number four on the big overhead clock. We quickly learn the owner of those eyes, our title character, knows everything about the train station without ever being seen. He lives in the walls behind the grates and observes all, Rear Window-like, stealing food to stay alive and machine parts from the toy store to complete his automaton.
When he is caught stealing by the bitter toy shop owner (Ben Kingsley), he reluctantly forms an actual human relationship. We get the impression it’s been a long time … for both of them. Hugo’s secret weapon is Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz), the shop owner’s curious goddaughter. She just wants an adventure. The symbiotic relationship is very important here – the boy needs the heart-shaped key the girl wears about her neck to make the automaton work, the girl needs the boy to discover what life can be, the toy shop owner needs the boy and the automaton to reawaken his own past. And all three need a working robot to advance the plot, or we’re all just gonna be miserable forever.
Hugo is my favorite type of story – the one in which broken people get fixed. The film centers about a broken robot, but we see it’s not just the mechanical man who needs fixing – the boy and girl both have no parents, the toy shop owner knows only pain. Even the secondary characters are broken: the rickety gendarme with the gimpy leg (Sacha Baron Cohen), enormous Uncle Vernon shying away from otherwise welcoming Madame Maxime, both worse for the helplessness. Why? Because her pooch is broken, too; the dog just barks at him whenever he gets close. I will never tire of a tale in which a damaged person is made whole, or perhaps not “whole,” but human. I’ll take human. This is the point of life, no? It sucks, but you keep on doing it. We always commend those who get up again and again.
I like this side of Martin Scorsese; I honestly wish there were more of this, and less of bludgeoning in boroughs of NYC. Now if can just find the key to my own automaton.
Rated PG, 127 Minutes
D: Martin Scorsese
W: John Logan
Genre: Discovery
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Film buffs
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Why was this film made?
