Hugo

I watched Hugo with my brother and his wife—who both loved it—while I came away with mixed feelings. On the surface, it’s a gorgeous film: dreamy and precise in equal measure. The set pieces are spectacular, and the bold, unapologetic CGI is used so confidently that you don’t mind it. It’s like musicians using Auto-Tune creatively—Scorsese wasn’t shy about throwing the best technology at his material, and it pays off in lush visuals that honor cinema itself. But this is also a personal film, one that feels like Scorsese made it for his younger self. And because of that, it tries to do too much. Fairy tales, by design, are universal. Hugo wants to be one, but its story resists universality. Instead, it narrows in on art, family, loneliness, death, and feeling unmoored—while also retelling the life of Georges Méliès, the French pioneer of cinema. Does it succeed? Only partly. It certainly honors Méliès, and that’s no small thing. The cast helps carry the vision: Ben Kingsley is remarkable as Méliès, Sasha Baron Cohen actually looks like he’s having fun, and Christopher Lee glides in as a wise old librarian dispensing books and cryptic advice. Even the kids (Asa Butterfield and Chloë Grace Moretz, with her painfully stilted British accent) are solid enough. The problem isn’t the acting—it’s the story. The film tries to hit ten different thematic targets and misses most of them. Méliès’s struggles are trivialized into something so absurd that I honestly wondered whether the orphan boy might have been better off in the orphanage than stuck with this “tormented genius.” The film paints Méliès as if his greatest tragedy was that cinema changed after the war and left him behind. It makes it out that, he was happily married to his childhood sweetheart, no children, a godchild, and a modest flat in Paris. Hardly destitute. That hardly justifies the cruelty the film assigns him toward a homeless child. The loneliness subplot fares even worse—confused, unfocused, and emotionally hollow. What does work, however, are the direct glimpses into Méliès’s films and artistry. Those sequences are pure magic. I wish the movie had leaned fully into that instead of muddling its message with automatons, Dickensian orphans, and an overcooked theme of loneliness. In the end, Hugo is both dazzling and frustrating: a love letter to cinema wrapped in a half-hearted fairy tale. Lose the kid, keep the Méliès.