"... If you lose your purpose... it's like you're broken..."

Well, after a delay due to a very stupid cable company, who shall remain nameless for legal reasons, we are BACK with the Covid Quarantine Film Festival!

We’re gonna talk about a film tonight that is outstanding, yet rarely appears on anyone’s “movies to talk about” lists. It’s a delightful comedy, with touches of raw emotional sadness. It’s a wonder to watch from a filmmaking point of view, and it’s also a very good film history lesson. It has a star-filled cast, working under one of the true masters of the filmmaking art. It captures the magic of being a dreamer. And, to be quite honest, it is simply a wonderful film. I am talking about Martin Scorsese’s Hugo.

The film, based on the equally-wonderful book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick, tells the story of a young boy named Hugo Cabret. The setting is early 1930’s Paris. After the tragic death of his father (played almost like a cameo by Jude Law), Hugo (Asa Butterfield) is taken in by his alcoholic uncle Claude, who works in the Paris train station attending the clocks. Claude is a hopeless drunk, forcing Hugo to become the clock-tender. Claude, in turn, mysteriously disappears after a drinking binge, leaving Hugo to keep up with the job of making sure all the station clocks are running perfectly. He has to do so in order to survive, because he has no other place to live other than the ramshackle space within the station clockworks. In essence, he has to do whatever he can in order to survive, be it lie, cheat, and steal.

Hugo also has a goal. When his uncle arrives at Hugo’s home to tell him of his father’s death, he is given only a few fleeting moments to gather his belongings. One thing he does manage to take with him is an old automaton, a spooky robotic man his father rescued from the garbage heap of the museum he worked for. Hugo and his father have been slowly trying to repair the automaton. Hugo has tried to keep working on the mechanical man, following the notes left to him in his father’s notebook, but it has been slow going. He has been stealing parts and pieces from a toy repair shop in the station, but is caught one day by the angry old man (Ben Kingsley) who runs the shop.

I’m trying to keep this as spoiler-free as I can because there are details that are just too perfect to spill in the story. That being said, the old man’s goddaughter, Isabelle (played to utter perfection by Chloe Grace Moretz), befriends Hugo, and wants to help him solve the mystery of the automaton and what secrets the mechanical man might hold. We come to find out that the angry old man is Georges Melies. For those of you who are not familiar with that name, Melies was one of the first true magicians of filmmaking. He is known now for such classics as From the Earth to the Moon, one of the first Jules Verne adventures to be filmed, known primarily for the classic scene of a giant bullet-like spaceship hitting the Man In The Moon directly in the eye.

The story, though, does not end with these characters. The biggest “character” in the film is the tiny microcosm of life within the train station itself. It acts as it’s own village within the confines of walls and railroads and clocks. Each shop owner is known to the others, and they interact daily like their own family unit. The station inspector/policeman (Sasha Baron Cohen) has very little in the way of “people skills,” more dedicated to his job or policing the station than he is with niceties of politeness. Yet he has a romantic eye for the station’s flower shop girl (Emily Mortimer). The café mistress, Madame Emile (Frances de la Tour), has her own suitor, Monsieur Frick (Richard Griffiths), the owner of the newsstand, but Madame Emile’s little dog despises Frick and will not let him get near her without barking and growling. As we watch Hugo’s adventure evolve, we also get to see these other station workers find their way to happiness, in truly delightful fashions.

But, Martin Scorsese, a devoted student of the art of film and it’s history, takes real pleasure in telling the story of Georges Melies. Melies was a stage magician who was introduced to movies after seeing a short film at a carnival and became entranced by the possibilities the movie camera offered. Having no official training in filmmaking, he began by building his own camera, and started making films the way he only way he knew how – by using his vast knowledge of stage trickery and magician’s misdirection, to create some of the finest pieces of early filmmaking in the world. But, after World War I ended, the audiences for his films dwindled away. The horrific reality of the brutality of war left his audiences weary of magical tales of fairies and dragons and trips to the moon. He was forced to sell his studio and sacrificed the master copies of his films to companies who would melt down the film stock in order to make heels for ladies’ shoes. Some 400 films were thought lost forever as a result, and Melies disappeared into obscurity, spending what little money he had left to buy the toy repair shop in the station. It was long thought that Melies had died during the war, and, well, Melies preferred that story to being thought of as a complete failure, and let his “death” remain the end of his story.

Thankfully, early students of the filmmaking art, namely Rene Tabard in particular, after finding out that Melies had indeed survived the war and was still living in Paris, pushed his fellow film students to scour the planet in search of copies of Melies’ films. After a search that included farmhouses, vaults, underground bunkers, and the wreckages of movie theatres destroyed in the war, the students were rewarded with almost half of the Melies library of work, which were painstakingly restored as best as could be done. Melies became one of the heads of the faculty of the Paris School of Art, leading the Department of Film Studies until his death.

I know, that sounds like it would make for a rather boring film, but the blending of fact and fiction done by Selznick in the original book brings the story into the realm of an almost-fantasy adventure. Hugo and Isabelle become best friends and the interactions with the two and their station-working “family” is very well done. We find ourselves learning why the station inspector is such an unfeeling person on the outside, guarding his heart from anything resembling hope, love, and life. We watch Hugo’s sadness and frustration build as he tries everything he can think of to fix the mechanical man, if only because it is his one last connection to the father he loved. And, yes, we even see the stirrings of love between Hugo and Isabelle.

I do have to mention that this film also has one of my true film idols in one of his last roles before his death. As Monsieur Labisse, the owner of the station book shop, Sir Christopher Lee has several key scenes, acting as Hugo’s advisor as well as friend, after Isabelle introduces Hugo to Labisse. Lee was never a small man, in stature or in character, but his Labisse is shown as a towering man of quiet strength and mind. Isabelle asks him several times about certain books or topics, and Labisse directs her to the exact location, shelf, and title she needs, despite his shop being a gigantic collection of anything and everything ever put on paper, it seems. Labisse is very formal, greeting the young couple with the same respect and dignity he would greet any other customer, and yet, every now and then, Lee lets us see the man’s heart, as he also sees the two growing fonder of one another as the film evolves. Lee’s performance is a thing of beauty, one of masterly grace and charm, and it deserves much more praise than it received when the film was first released.

I feel like I have told you more than I wanted to about Hugo, and, at the same time, I feel like I have barely begun to describe how truly great this film is. I leave it to you to decide when you watch it for yourself. But, above all else, you do, indeed, need to see this movie for yourself. It is so far away from anything Scorsese has ever done – there are no gangsters, no dictionaries of foul language, no “gritty New York” street scenes or Mafia killings. Instead, what Scorsese seems to have done with Hugo is allow himself to be a fan of the history of his art, and, shockingly, into his own childlike wonder at what the power of dreaming can accomplish.

Hugo is available on Amazon Prime, but I would suggest you consider owning your own copy. It’s that good a film, folks…