This film is unlike any that Scorsese has ever made, or at least those of his that I've seen. It is a complex mixture of mechanics, imagination, familiar images, people's psychology and most of all dreaming the way children dream. It is both a tribute and a biography although to call it either would diminish what it really is – a masterpiece of a master storyteller.
It is the story of one child prodigy (Hugo – acted by Asa Butterfield) who fixes things and who inherits from his father, an automaton that is broken.
It is massively complex, but the boy is able to fix it. He cannot make it run however because he lacks one essential element and doesn't know where to find it. He meets a young girl his own age, 12 (Isabella – charmingly recreated by Chloe Grace Maretz that the Romance Novels would describe as "having pluck." She has around her neck, the piece of the machine that finally makes it work: It is a heart shaped key. By this time, we are so engrossed in the plot that the symbolism passes right by us. It does not pass by Scorsese though. He reminds us that without heart, nothing works. The heart is the key to turning us from machines into well functioning humans.
Everyone of major importance seems to learn something, and as a consequence, so do we.
Georges Mêlées (played by the master of understatement Ben Kingsley) learns that perhaps he should not look at the past as failings and filled with unimaginable horror. He should perhaps see the world as he and his wife created it for themselves. The world for them was for fun and dreams and wizards and mermaids and images that could come from no one but someone with a very fertile imagination who essentially loved. Mama Jeanne (his wife – Helen McCrory) is a startling woman who at just the right moment learns that she can make her husband see the world he left behind through her eyes. She learns that her feminine view has its place as well.
Isabella has her first adventure and she laps it up the way a kitten laps a bowl of milk.
Finally Hugo finds a family who understands him, and he learns that he can grow and develop.
It's a fine film well worth an evening.
It is the story of one child prodigy (Hugo – acted by Asa Butterfield) who fixes things and who inherits from his father, an automaton that is broken.
It is massively complex, but the boy is able to fix it. He cannot make it run however because he lacks one essential element and doesn't know where to find it. He meets a young girl his own age, 12 (Isabella – charmingly recreated by Chloe Grace Maretz that the Romance Novels would describe as "having pluck." She has around her neck, the piece of the machine that finally makes it work: It is a heart shaped key. By this time, we are so engrossed in the plot that the symbolism passes right by us. It does not pass by Scorsese though. He reminds us that without heart, nothing works. The heart is the key to turning us from machines into well functioning humans.
Everyone of major importance seems to learn something, and as a consequence, so do we.
Georges Mêlées (played by the master of understatement Ben Kingsley) learns that perhaps he should not look at the past as failings and filled with unimaginable horror. He should perhaps see the world as he and his wife created it for themselves. The world for them was for fun and dreams and wizards and mermaids and images that could come from no one but someone with a very fertile imagination who essentially loved. Mama Jeanne (his wife – Helen McCrory) is a startling woman who at just the right moment learns that she can make her husband see the world he left behind through her eyes. She learns that her feminine view has its place as well.
Isabella has her first adventure and she laps it up the way a kitten laps a bowl of milk.
Finally Hugo finds a family who understands him, and he learns that he can grow and develop.
It's a fine film well worth an evening.