Martin Scorsese’s Hugo is, on the surface, a movie about the adventures of a young orphan in 1930s Paris. Hugo Cabret searches for the mystery of his father’s death and instead finds the keys to a whole new world – the magical world of movies. Along the way, he meets Isabelle, a precocious girl whose godfather Georges works at the train station where Hugo lives. As it turns out, Georges is in fact Georges Méliès, one of the founding fathers of cinema.
The film is a nostalgic love letter to cinema, both in its story and the techniques it employs to immerse the audience. Based on Brian Selznick’s 2007 historical fiction novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Scorsese’s film makes excellent use of its vibrant characters. The precocious, adventurous children and the secretive, surreptitious adults around them have a lot to say about the world they live in and the way they see it.
- Isabelle: This might be an adventure, and I’ve never had one before – outside of books, at least.
- Station inspector: Where do you belong, then? A child has to belong somewhere!
- Hugo: I’d imagine the whole world was one big machine. Machines never come with any extra parts, you know. They always come with the exact amount they need. So I figured if the entire world was one big machine… I couldn’t be an extra part. I had to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason too.
- Georges: Come and dream with me.
- Hugo: Maybe that’s why a broken machine always makes me a little sad – because it isn’t able to do what it was meant to do. Maybe it’s the same with people; if you lose your purpose, it’s like you’re broken.
- Lisette: Don’t forget to smile.
Station Inspector: Which one? I’ve mastered three! - Georges: If you’ve ever wondered where your dreams come from, you look around… this is where they’re made.
- Hugo: I thought if I could fix it, then I wouldn’t be so alone.
- Hugo: He said it was like seeing his dreams in the middle of the day. The movies were our special place.
- Isabelle: Oh, this is superlative!
- Isabelle: Oh, well, it’s a terribly long story filled with circumlocutions.
- Isabelle, reading from “The Invention of Dreams”: “The filmmaker Georges Méliès was one of the first to realize that films had the power to capture dreams.”
