9
Aug/13

FRONT/ROW CINEMA: HUGO

9
Aug/13

Asa Butterfield stars as a homeless orphan on a mission in Martin Scorsese’s 3-D adventure

SEE/CHANGE: HUGO (Martin Scorsese, 2011)
South Street Seaport
Corner of Front & Fulton Sts.
Saturday, August 10, free, dusk
www.southstreetseaport.com
www.hugomovie.com

Martin Scorsese wears his cinematic heart on his sleeve in his first family-friendly film, Hugo. Based on Brian Selznick’s Caldecott-winning 2007 illustrated historical-fiction novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the 3-D movie follows the adventures of the title character, a homeless orphan boy (Asa Butterfield) who survives by his wits in a Paris train station in the early 1900s. He spends his days stealing small bits of food, winding the big clock, avoiding Inspector Gustav (Sacha Baron Cohen), and trying to find parts for an automaton he is rebuilding, hoping it will have a message for him from his father (Jude Law). He soon makes his only friend, a girl named Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz) who is being raised by her godparents, the bitter Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley) and his wife, Mama Jeanne (Helen McCrory). When it turns out that Papa Georges is the one and only Georges Méliès, who made the world’s first science-fiction film, A Trip to the Moon, among hundreds of others, then was thought to have died in obscurity, all of his work destroyed, Hugo and Isabelle, along with the help of film historian René Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg), are determined to resurrect Papa Georges and his reputation. Gorgeously shot by Robert Richardson and featuring marvelous period sets by Dante Ferretti, Hugo is beautiful to look at, the camera roaming through the immense train station and up the tall clock tower like in a Jules Verne story. Such side plots as the budding romances between a café owner (Frances de la Tour) and the newspaper seller (Richard Griffiths) and between Gustav and a shy flower girl (Emily Mortimer) feel forced, and the main narrative meanders its way into treacly territory as all the parts slowly come together. At its heart, Hugo is a movie about the love of movies, paying tribute to the early cinema of Méliès, Harold Lloyd, and others but it gets too stuck on the underlying theme of the preservation of old films, one of Scorsese’s driving forces. Still, Hugo is a visual treat in which Scorsese makes the most of 3-D technology, particularly in the first half, before things get a little too sticky (and slickly) sweet, even for a children’s film. Hugo, which was nominated for eleven Oscars and won five technical awards — Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, Best Visual Effects, Best Sound Editing, and Best Sound Mixing — is screening August 10 as part of the South Street Seaport’s “Front/Row” “See/Change” series, which continues August 14 with The Amazing Spider-Man, August 17 with Chicago, and August 21 with Back to the Future. For a day-by-day listing of free summer movie screenings throughout New York City, go here.