Fearful of being caught by the pompous station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), and with no way of cashing his uncle’s checks, Hugo works and hides in the clock tower, feeding himself by filching snacks from local shops. The young Marty suffered from asthma, which often kept him at home glued to old movies on TV. (MORE: See Arrival of a Train in the Top 25 Horror Movies) That makes Hugo not only an act of devotion from a modern movie artist to the wizards who inspired him it is also the director’s imaginary autobiography. Scorsese, sampling his eternal passion, encompasses a century and more of film legerdemain. From his earliest movie memories comes a film evoking the very earliest films: the Lumière brothers’ 1896 Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, which so startled audiences with its immediacy that it can be called the first horror film, and Georges Méliès’ 1902 A Trip to the Moon, the legendary early fantasy film, in which a spaceship from Earth rockets onto the lunar surface and lodges, splat!, in the right eye of the Man in the Moon. The 69-year-old director has never lost his infant wonder at the spectacle of giant images in a darkened movie palace. Hugo has a staunch sibling in Scorsese, a life-long lover and preserver of classic films. ![]() ![]() The child is also fascinated by mechanical marvels like clocks, metal robots and moving pictures. As Scorsese has said, “It’s a story about the boy and his relationship with his dead father.” The living take up the work of the dead and, by completing it, justify and fulfill their joint labors. His dad had been repairing a mysterious automaton, and Hugo needs to connect with him by finishing the job. Hugo has no parent: he was orphaned after his beloved father (Jude Law) died in a fire. But that boy felt suffocated by his single mom’s demanding love he suffered from a surfeit of parenting. Scorsese hasn’t put a kid at the center of one of his movies since the 1974 Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, with another 11-year-old (Alfred Lutter’s Tommy). (And, in his last feature film, Shutter Island, the mind chaotic.) So why would he make a movie of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick’s rhapsodically nostalgic children’s book? Martin Scorsese made his rep as the fierce bard of American gangster machismo from Mean Streets to The Departed he has sung the body choleric. The vertiginous ecstasy of these two magnificent tracking shots, no less than the boy’s solemn urgency, instantly alert moviegoers than Hugo is special, and so is Hugo. Now the camera follows Hugo through the clockwork innards of Gare Montmartre, rushing to keep up but never losing pace or grace. No one knows that the boy, Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), is the station’s timekeeper: regulating the clocks, great and small, since his drunken uncle disappeared and left the job to a lad who must steal to live. ![]() Follow 3-D camera swoops over the rooftops of Paris, past the Eiffel Tower and toward Montmartre Station it dips to cruise above the tracks and moves into the main hall, where an 11-year-old boy is forging his own furtive trek through the commuting crowds.
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