Hugo is a 2011 American 3D historical adventure drama film directed and co-produced by Martin Scorsese and adapted for the screen by John Logan. Based on Brian Selznick's novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, it is about a boy who lives alone in the Gare Montparnasse railway station in Paris in the 1930s. A co-production between Graham King's GK Films and Johnny Depp's Infinitum Nihil, the film stars Ben Kingsley, Sacha Baron Cohen, Asa Butterfield, Chloë Grace Moretz, Ray Winstone, Emily Mortimer, Jude Law, Helen McCrory, and Christopher Lee.
Hugo is Scorsese's first film shot in 3D, of which the filmmaker remarked: "I found 3D to be really interesting, because the actors were more upfront emotionally. Their slightest move, their slightest intention is picked up much more precisely." The film was released in the United States on November 23, 2011.
The film was received with critical acclaim, with many critics praising its visual design, acting and direction. However, it was financially unsuccessful, grossing only $185 million at the box office and barely surpassing its budget. Hugo received eleven 2011 Academy Award nominations (including Best Picture), more than any other film that year, and won five Oscars: Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, Best Sound Mixing, Best Sound Editing and Best Visual Effects. It was also nominated for eight BAFTAs, winning two, and was nominated for three Golden Globe Awards, earning Scorsese his third Golden Globe for Best Director.
Plot
In 1931, 12-year-old Hugo Cabret lives in Paris with his father, a widowed, but kind and devoted master clockmaker. Hugo's father takes him to see films and loves those of Georges Méliès best of all.
When Hugo's father dies in a museum fire, Hugo is taken away by his alcoholic uncle, who maintains the clocks in the railway station of Gare Montparnasse. The uncle teaches him how to tend to the clocks, then disappears. Hugo lives a secretive life in the station's hidden chambers and passageways, maintaining the clocks, avoiding the vindictive Station Inspector Gustave and his doberman Maximilion, and working on his father's most ambitious project: repairing a broken automaton â€" a mechanical man designed to write with a pen. Hugo begins stealing the parts he needs for the automaton, but a toy-store owner catches him and confiscates his carefully drawn blueprints.
The automaton is missing a critical part: a heartâ€"shaped key. Convinced the machine contains a message from his father, Hugo goes to desperate lengths to fix it. He gains the assistance of Isabelle, the toy shop owner's goddaughter. He introduces her to the movies, which her godfather has never let her see. Remarkably, Isabelle turns out to have the automaton's key. When they use it to activate the automaton, it produces a drawing of a film scene Hugo remembers his father telling him about. They discover the film was created by Isabelle's godfather, Georges Mélièsâ€"a cinema legend, now neglected and disillusionedâ€"and that the automaton was his beloved creation from his days as a magician. Searching the Méliès household for clues, they find a cache of the filmmaker's fantastic drawings. However, Méliès catches them in the act, admonishes Isabelle, and banishes Hugo from their home.
Hugo and Isabelle travel to Paris's great Film Academy Library, where they find a book with photos and biographical information about Méliès. They meet René Tabard, a film expert who venerates Méliès, and whoâ€"like most of the film worldâ€"assumes Méliès is dead, as he was never seen after World War I brought an abrupt halt to his career. René shows Hugo and Isabelle the collection of rare Méliès memorabilia in his Library office. When he learns Méliès is alive and living in Paris, he is incredulous, then excited at the possibility of meeting the great man.
Hugo and Isabelle invite René to the Méliès home, where they encounter Méliès's wife, Jeanne, whom René immediately recognizes as the star of many of Méliès films. René, who has brought a small projector, shows the group his copy of Méliès's surviving film, A Trip to the Moon. When Méliès finds the four in his parlour, he is outraged, but Jeanne convinces him to cherish his glorious accomplishments rather than regretting his lost dream. He recounts his history as a film-maker and his bankruptcy during The Great War (World War I), finishing with the sad tale of donating his beloved automaton to a museum where it was ignored and destroyed in a fire.
Realizing that his automaton is Méliès's creation, Hugo races back to the train station to retrieve it. However, he is spotted by Inspector Gustave, who chases Hugo through the station. As he approaches one of the train platforms, Hugo stumbles and the machine flies from his grasp, landing on the tracks. As he struggles to retrieve it, a train approaches, and the Inspector rescues Hugo a split second before the train would have crushed him. Before the Inspector is able to take Hugo to the orphanage, Méliès arrives and claims Hugo as his child, and the Inspector lets him go.
In the final scene, Mélièsâ€"accompanied by his wife, his goddaughter, and Hugoâ€"is the honoured guest at a grand celebration, where his invaluable contributions to cinema are acknowledged and praised.
Cast
Michael Pitt, Martin Scorsese, and Brian Selznick have cameo roles.
Production
Pre-production
GK Films acquired the screen rights to The Invention of Hugo Cabret shortly after the book was published in 2007. Initially, Chris Wedge was signed in to direct the adaptation and John Logan was contracted to write the screenplay. The film was initially titled Hugo Cabret. Several actors were hired, including Ben Kingsley, Sacha Baron Cohen, Asa Butterfield, Chloë Grace Moretz and Helen McCrory. Jude Law, Ray Winstone, Christopher Lee, Frances de la Tour and Richard Griffiths later joined the project. Hugo was originally budgeted at $100 million but overran with a final budget of between $156 million and $170 million. In February 2012, Graham King summed up his experience of producing Hugo: "Let's just say that it hasn't been an easy few months for me â€" there's been a lot of Ambien involved".
Filming
Production began in London on June 29, 2010. The first shooting location was at the Shepperton Studios in London. The Nene Valley Railway near Peterborough also loaned their original Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits rolling stock to the studio.
In August 2010, production moved to Paris for two weeks. Locations included the Sainte-Geneviève Library, and the Sorbonne (where a lecture hall was converted into a 1930s cinema hall) in the 5th arrondissement and the Théâtre de l'Athénée and its surrounding area in the 9th. High school Lycée Louis-le-Grand served as the film's base of operations in Paris; its cafeteria served 700 meals a day for the and crew.
Music
The film's soundtrack includes an Oscar-nominated original score composed by Howard Shore, and also makes prominent use of the Danse macabre by Camille Saint-Saëns and Gnossienne No. 1 by Erik Satie.
Historical references
The backstory and primary features of Georges Méliès' life as depicted in the film are largely accurate: He became interested in film after seeing a demonstration of the Lumière brothers' camera; he was a magician and toymaker; he experimented with automata; he owned a theatre (Theatre Robert-Houdin); he was forced into bankruptcy; his film stock was reportedly melted down for its cellulose; he became a toy salesman at the Montparnasse station, and he was eventually awarded the Légion d'honneur medal after a period of terrible neglect. Many of the early silent films shown in the movie are Méliès's actual works, such as Le voyage dans la lune (1902). However, the film does not mention Méliès' two children, his brother Gaston (who worked with Méliès during his film-making career), or his first wife Eugénie, who was married to Méliès during the time he made films (and who died in 1913). The film shows Méliès married to Jeanne d'Alcy during their filmmaking period, when in reality they did not marry until 1925.
The automaton's design was inspired by one made by the Swiss watchmaker Henri Maillardet, which Selznick had seen in the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, as well as the Jaquet-Droz automaton "the writer". A portion of the scene with Harold Lloyd in Safety Last! (1923), hanging from the clock, is shown when the main characters sneak into a movie theater. Later, Hugo similarly hangs from the hands of a large clock on a clock tower to escape a pursuer like Lloyd in Safety Last!.
Several viewings of the film L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat are portrayed, depicting the shocked reaction of the audience â€" although this view is in doubt.
Emil Lager, Ben Addis, and Robert Gill make cameo appearances as the father of Gypsy jazz guitar, Django Reinhardt, the Spanish surrealist painter, Salvador DalÃ, and the Irish writer James Joyce, respectively. The names of all three characters appear towards the end of the film's cast credit list.
The book that Monsieur Labisse gives Hugo as a gift, Robin Hood le proscrit (Robin Hood the outlaw), was written by Alexandre Dumas in 1864 as a French translation of an 1838 work by Pierce Egan the Younger in England. The book is symbolic, as Hugo must avoid the "righteous" law enforcement (Inspector Gustave) to live in the station and later to restore the automaton both to a functioning status and to its rightful owner.
Reception
Box office performance
Hugo earned $15.4 million over its Thanksgiving weekend debut. It went on to earn US$73,864,507 domestically and $111,905,653 overseas, for a worldwide gross of $185,770,160.
Despite praise from critics, Hugo was cited as one of the year's notable box office flops. Its perceived failure was due to competition with Disney's The Muppets and Summit's Breaking Dawn Part 1. The film was estimated to have made a net loss of $100 million.
Producer Graham King said that the film's box office results were painful. "There's no finger-pointing â€" I'm the producer and I take the responsibility," he said. "Budget-wise, there just wasn't enough prep time and no one really realized how complicated doing a 3D film was going to be. I went through three line-producers because no one knew exactly what was going on. Do I still think it's a masterpiece that will be talked about in 20 years? Yes. But once the schedule started getting out of whack, things just spiraled and spiraled and that's when the avalanche began."
Critical reception
Hugo received universal critical acclaim. It currently holds a 94% "Certified Fresh" rating on aggregate review site Rotten Tomatoes based on 224 reviews, with an average score of 8.4/10. The site's main consensus reads "Hugo is an extravagant, elegant fantasy with an innocence lacking in many modern kids' movies, and one that emanates an unabashed love for the magic of cinema." Metacritic gave the film an average score of 83 based on 41 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four out of four stars saying "Hugo is unlike any other film Martin Scorsese has ever made, and yet possibly the closest to his heart: a big-budget, family epic in 3-D, and in some ways, a mirror of his own life. We feel a great artist has been given command of the tools and resources he needs to make a movie about â€" movies." Peter Rainer of The Christian Science Monitor gave it a "B+" grade and termed it as "an odd mixture: a deeply personal impersonal movie" and concluded that "Hugo is a mixed bag but one well worth rummaging through." Christy Lemire said that it had an "abundant love of the power of film; being a hardcore cinephile (like Scorsese) might add a layer of enjoyment, but it certainly isn't a prerequisite for walking in the door" besides being "slightly repetitive and overlong". Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune rated it three stars and described it as "rich and stimulating even when it wanders" explaining "every locale in Scorsese's vision of 1931 Paris looks and feels like another planet. The filmmaker embraces storybook artifice as wholeheartedly as he relays the tale's lessons in the importance of film preservation." Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal said that "visually Hugo is a marvel, but dramatically it's a clockwork lemon".
Hugo was selected for the Royal Film Performance 2011 with a screening at the Odeon, Leicester Square in London on 28 November 2011 in the presence of the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall in support of the Cinema and Television Benevolent Fund.
Richard Corliss of Time named it one of the Top 10 Best Movies of 2011, saying "Scorsese's love poem, rendered gorgeously in 3-D, restores both the reputation of an early pioneer and the glory of movie history â€" the birth of a popular art form given new life through a master's application of the coolest new techniques".
James Cameron called Hugo "a masterpiece" and that the film had the best use of 3D he had seen, surpassing even his own acclaimed films.
Top ten lists
The film appeared on the following critics' lists of the top ten films of 2011:
Accolades
References
External links
- Official website
- Hugo at the Internet Movie Database
- Hugo at the American Film Institute Catalog
- Hugo in the British Film Institute's "Explore film..." database
- Hugo at Box Office Mojo
- Hugo at Rotten Tomatoes
- Hugo at Metacritic
- Hugo, Deep Staging and Keyframed Camera Work Comes to 3D Movies
- 3D Stereoscopic Cinematography review of Hugo 3D on the 3-D Stereoscopic Film and Animation Blog