'Hugo' review: 3-D bloat gums up the works

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'Hugo' review: 3-D bloat gums up the works
November 23, 2011
Mick LaSalle
SF Gate

Hugo

ALERT VIEWER Science fiction. Starring Asa Butterfield, Ben Kingsley, Chloe Grace Moretz and Sacha Baron Cohen. Directed by Martin Scorsese. (PG. 126 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

It's rough being a beginner, but it can be even rougher trying to live up to one's own legend. In "Hugo," Martin Scorsese takes what might have been a charming children's movie and blows it out and distorts it so that its proportions might be worthy of a great filmmaker.

Instead of just doing a 3-D movie, he tries to impress us with a deluge of 3-D effects. He takes a delicate narrative and stuffs it to 126 long minutes, so that children, the intended audience, will be squirming and shifting in their seats. (Their parents, too.) And he takes a visual style straight out of the steam-punk films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet ("Delicatessen," "Micmacs") and tries to go their sources one better, with more gears, more gadgets and more gimmicks.

The result is a movie that's kinetic yet slow, whose joys are architectural more than spiritual. The camera swoops through corridors and skirts around corners, with every bit of art decoration in perfect focus, every metal surface gleaming. Sometimes the movie's beauty is its own reward. An automaton at the center of the story, with its human face looking mournful and impassive, is one of the year's great movie props, an evocative masterpiece of design. But the human characters feel mostly under glass, more emblematic than real, their pains and terrors just elements in the landscape.
Best comes first

"Hugo" is at its best in the opening minutes, a long pre-credits segment, short on dialogue, that shows how young Hugo (Asa Butterfield) ended up living under such extreme circumstances. We see Montparnasse train station in the 1930s, mostly from above, as a swarm of individuals, each following his own singular path. There are statues straight out of a Roman vacation - rows of hooded Giordano Bruno bronzes from the Campo de' Fiori and a figure from the Bernini fountain in the Piazza Navona. At one of the tables, in a brief literary cameo, sits a dead ringer for James Joyce.

Hugo, a little boy, lives inside the vast clock mechanism, orphaned and alone, living off stolen food and the dream of repairing the automaton that his father (Jude Law, lovely in his one scene) was working on when he died. To replace the gears inside the automaton, Hugo regularly steals from an aging toymaker, but the old man, whose name is Georges (Ben Kingsley), doesn't like that one bit. The interaction of Hugo and this bitter and sorrowful old man, and the impact of each on the other's life, becomes the story of "Hugo," though the movie is so encumbered by bloat that it takes almost half the running time to settle on that main narrative thread.
History lesson

By the time it gets down to cases, "Hugo" - based on the Brian Selznick novel, "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" - becomes a brief on behalf of film preservation and a crash course on early French film history. With obvious relish, Scorsese makes a stylistic connection from his own film to the fanciful, mechanistic shorts of the pioneer Georges Méliès, linking to him through the work of modern-day fantasists such as Jeunet and Tim Burton. To be fair, this stuff has been done - done to death - but at least Scorsese does it beautifully.

The child actors, Asa Butterfield and Chloe Grace Moretz (as the old man's ward), are labored in their delivery and give intermittent performances. Sacha Baron Cohen is much better - effective, comic and yet subtle - as the feared train station inspector, and Richard Griffiths and Frances de la Tour are amiable in brief appearances. Ben Kingsley, alas, being in a larger role, is more stuck in the movie's rhythms and emotions, which are, respectively, static and bogus.

Ultimately, the biggest disappointment of "Hugo" is that it fails to make the case for 3-D as a legitimate tool for the serious filmmaker. Eventually, an artist will come along and use 3-D to enhance and not distract from a movie's deeper values. Then again, if Scorsese couldn't do it, maybe it can't be done.