![]() THR COVER STORY: The Dreams of Martin Scorsese The labyrinth of gears, cranks, shafts and stairs that comprise this hidden chamber is explored in an extraordinary shot that winds up through it, and when the old man expires, Hugo, with nowhere else to go, surreptitiously takes charge of the clocks, unbeknownst to the vigilant station inspector ( Sacha Baron Cohen). The eponymous orphan here is Hugo Cabret ( Asa Butterfield), a prepubescent youngster who, after the death of his beloved father (Jude Law in flashback), is grudgingly taken under wing by a dissolute uncle ( Ray Winstone) who tends to the complicated system of clocks at one of Paris’ major train stations, circa 1931 (as specified in Selznick’s book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, although not in the film). In this case, however, the obvious expenditures of time, care and money would seem to have been devoted to matters directly connected to Scorsese’s overriding obsessions with film - the particulars of its creation, manner of presentation, the nature of the people who make it, its importance to the inner lives of those who love it and preservation both of film itself and the reputations of its practitioners.īy contrast, the film’s faults have more to do with less exalted issues such as slight overlength, a certain repetitiveness and the evident fact that Scorsese is not a great director of physical comedy. As has been seen all too many times, this sort of carte blanche has its pitfalls in indulgence, extravagance and waste. The richness of detail and evident care that has been extended to all aspects of the production are of a sort possible only when a top director has a free hand to do everything he or she feels is necessary to entirely fulfill a project’s ambitions. For anyone remotely interested in film history, Hugo must be seen in 3D if only for this interlude, which the director and cinematographer Robert Richardson have pulled off through an impeccably precise combination of framing and timing. ![]() ![]() In an incidental moment that alone justifies the entire recent resurgence of 3D, Scorsese recreates the legendary presentation of the Lumiere brothers’ 1897 Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, at which audiences flinched in horror as a train filmed coming into a station appeared to be headed right at them, in a way that astonishingly captures the reaction the brief clip was described as having created. With exceptional imagination, first Selznick and now Scorsese and scenarist John Logan have found a way to connect their resourceful leading characters with one of the great early figures of cinema, Georges Melies, most famous as the originator of the science fiction film with his 1902 A Trip to the Moon and, perhaps more significantly, the first man to recognize the connection between the cinema and dreams. Like so many of the most popular and enduring fictions centered on children, from Dickens to Harry Potter, this one is about orphans and castoffs, kids who must scheme, fight and resist authority to make their way in life. ![]()
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