Recently I criticized the movie In Time for not fleshing out its setting enough. I couldn't buy into the reality of the movie, so I couldn't enjoy the story.
The new Martin Scorcese-directed, family film Hugo has the opposite problem. It is so in love with its environment that it utterly derails the protagonist's narrative in order to explore the private lives of secondary characters with insane amounts of depth.
As a consequence, the movie feels episodic to the point that it's almost an anthology of unrelated tales, all of which happen to take place at a bustling train station slash shopping plaza in Paris in the 1930's.
At first we're led to believe the central character is Hugo, a pre-teen street urchin who lives inside the station's clock. Hugo is trying to repair a clockwork person, an automaton, who is Hugo's last remaining link to his father, a clockmaker who died in a museum fire.
Hugo keeps body and soul together by stealing food, which he must do while avoiding the cruel station inspector and his agressive german shepherd.
The station inspector is in love with a pretty florist, by the way, who lost a brother in World War One, but he's self-conscious about his gimpy left leg, a wound also acquired in the War -- whoops, whoops, I'm losing the thread here. Sorry.
Anyway, one day Hugo runs afoul of toy store owner Ben Kingsley, who steals the notebook which contains all of Hugo's mechanical sketchings. This leads Hugo to go to Kingsley's house, where he meets Kingsley's goddaughter Isabelle, a friendly girl who pledges to help Hugo recover his notebook.
Isabelle is a cheerful girl, but kind of lonely. All her friends are books, really, and she spends so much time at the bookstore she's on familiar terms with the owner, Monsieur Labisse, who -- whoops, off track again. My bad! Back to the main story.
Hugo and Isabelle discover, by sheer chance, that a key on a chain given to Isabelle by her godmother fits neatly into a lock on the automaton, which triggers the automaton to make a drawing, which leads Hugo and Isabelle to uncover the fact that the Ben Kingsley character was a prolific cinematographer in his younger days.
Kingsley is a bitter old coot at this point, but only because he'd rather be making movies than selling toys.
And... and... and...
...and the rest of the movie is pretty much about Ben Kingsley.
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, wait a second, what about that notebook Hugo was after? Did he ever recover that? Did it make any difference to the plot? The answers, in order, are 1) What about it? 2) No, and 3) No.
Nothing really matters to the plot in Hugo because everything is carefully contrived to reveal character backstory. It's the backstory that matters to Scorcese, overrated screenwriter John Logan, and perhaps author Brian Selznick. (I can't be sure. I haven't read the novel.)
What's missing, unfortunately, is frontstory.
The things that happen in the here and now of Hugo are mostly irrelevant and always meandering.
The movie is rendered entirely in 3D computer graphics, which are now so convincing I almost remember the movie as live action. This raises the curious question that if CGI starts to look identical to live action -- if computerized Ben Kingsley looks just like real Ben Kingsley -- then why not just shoot the thing AS live action?
I'm not sure. And I'm not sure why the movie loses interest in the quest of its main character so completely that it devotes itself to alternate characters like Kingsley and the station inspector.
But it does.
Unfortunately, Hugo is all setting, and, in the end, only setting.
SCORE
How Accomplished: 18/200
How Much I Enjoyed: 22/100
Neil, for starters it wasn't a german shepherd, it was a doberman....just kidding (well it WAS, but who cares?). Though I'd agree that Hugo leaned heavily on the "backstory", in fairness, I think it was that backstory, particularly as it related to Kingsley's character's evolution from magician to movie maker extraordinaire and all the stops in between, that really was the interesting piece. This glimpse into Kingsley's character's past and what the war had done to devastate everything he had worked for, explained how this cranky, old toy maker came to be...well, so cranky in the first place. From the moment we see Kingley's insensed reaction to Hugo's book of drawings, we know that there is something more to it than just a toy maker's disdain for a waif and his book of schematics. Though Hugo is the movie's main character, it is Kingley's character who seems to be the more intriguing of the two, at least I thought so. I'm a bit surprised that the gap between how accomplished and how much you enjoyed it wasn't greater. Don't ask me why? Keep up the good work...I enjoy your writing/film critiques.
ReplyDeleteYou're right, it was a doberman. Whoops!
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting that Kingsley's reaction to Hugo's notebook provided enough of a lure to keep you engaged in the story. I think that was clearly the intent. It just didn't work for me. Strange how these things are so subjective. (Unlike dog breeds.)
The reason I didn't give this movie a higher how accomplished score is partly a reaction to how much critical acclaim it's getting, which I feel is mostly due to Scorcese's reputation and the quality of the animation, neither of which tend to please me. (Proving that even my how accomplished score is highly subjective, despite my desire that it not be so.)