Fridae

There is a scene in Francis Ford Coppola's opulent adaptation of Dracula where the titular count enters a small tent and discovers in there something heralding the modern age that his decaying and dying Transylvania is missing out on: the amazing cinematograph, or as soon as people will know it, the motion picture. Enraptured by what he is witnessing, he rarely even stops to consider the eye-rolling dismissal voiced by heroine Mina Murray: 'You call this science? If you want culture, go to a museum!'

Martin Scorsese's Hugo is a tribute and a reminder to where thinking as voiced by Mina led to in real life. As funny as that bit of self-referential humour was, it was very much true that what is a billion-dollar industry today was back in its infancy, rather ill-thought of by many as too trivial to be a major scientific breakthrough and too insignificant to be culture. Missing from the pages of cinematic history are probably clips and films numbering in the thousands, craftsmen and geniuses, every one a dreamer, forever buried underneath the shifting sands of time as the result of neglect and ignorance.

Hugo is a historical fantasy, part fact and mostly dream, to one of these dreamers, the great George Melies, even though it is not told as his story. Set in the years between the two world wars, the film's protagonist is one Hugo Cabret, a boy who fixes the clocks in the great train station at Paris after the death of his father and his subsequent raising under his perpetually drunken Uncle Claude (Ray Winstone). But besides his day job, Hugo has a dream, to fix and complete the mysterious automaton that his father had left him. One day, he finds that the toymaker (Ben Kingsley) who runs the toy stall in the station and his precocious goddaughter Isabelle (Chloe Moretz), whom Hugo has befriended, may hold the literal key to the unlocking of the automaton. Meanwhile, Hugo and Isabelle's adventures attract the attention of film scholar Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg).

The toymaker, it turns out, is in fact the aforementioned George Melies, and the rest of the movie basically functions as almost a semi-documentary on the life of Melies, with the viewer basically being offered a primer on Melies alongside a pleasant historical fiction to the process of how Melies' films came down to us. While the real Melies indeed experienced similar financial straits to his cellular counterpart after the collapse of his business, the movie makes no pretense that it's a fantasy about Melies. Working in 3D with the same fluidity Tsui Hark did this year earlier in Flying Swords of Dragon Gate, Scorsese like Melies recalls that his goal is not to make a documentary, but like Melies, to make dreams. Scorsese's Paris is a dream of the City of Lights in which his camera seems to know nothing of the laws of physics, and the viewer almost feels to be gliding through. Blink and miss some cameos from Winston Churchill, James Joyce and Django Reinhardt. It's a dream after all.

Movies, Hugo implores, were man-made dreams before they ever were a science, culture or industry. This ostensible kiddie flick is a heartfelt valentine to not just Melies, but this most unique of 20th-century artforms as it speeds along into the 21st, an art that for an instance allowed mankind to dream together.

POSTSCRIPT: Lesson for David Fincher. When setting a movie in a non-english speaking European country, using the native language for signage and having characters speak English dialogue without mock accents actually makes the film more realistic. As a result this movie almost has better worldbuilding than Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.