NYFF ‘11: Hugo sneak preview
Last night the New York Film Festival did something (they took great pains to remind us) they’d only done once in their 49 year history: screen an unfinished film during the festival. The first film to receive this honor was Disney’s “Beauty In The Beast” in 1991, which went on to make a bajillion dollars, become the first animated feature to be nominated for Best Picture (back when there were only 5 slots) and is now rightly considered a classic. The second film to receive this distinction was last night revealed to be the upcoming Martin Scorsese directed adaptation of Brian Selznick’s book “The Invention Of Hugo Cabret” titled simply “Hugo.” And from what I saw it’s fate remains highly uncertain. We were shown a work-in-progress cut of the film with no color correction, unfinished sfx in a few spots, a temp score (to be rerecorded with full orchestra), a few stray green screens but for the most part the film was mostly there, otherwise they wouldn’t have shown it to us in the first place.
The film follows young Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), an orphan living in a Paris train station after his father passes away who spends his days windings the clocks in the station, stealing enough food to live on and avoiding the Station Inspector (Sasha Baron Cohen, doing a riff on a Peter Sellers character). At the opening of the film Hugo has a run in with Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley), who catches the young thief attempting to lift a wind-up mouse from his toy shop. in order to use the gears inside to build some things of his own. Georges is initially cruel to the boy, stealing his notebook filled with detailed renderings of various mechanical objects but after forming a friendship with his young goddaughter Isabelle (Chloe Moretz), eventually offers Hugo a job in his shop fixing toys. The train station is a beautifully rendered environment and occupied by a number of bustling inhabitants that especially in its Parisian setting will remind many of the work of Jean Pierre Jeunet (“Amelie”).
Hugo and Isabelle cavort around Paris and end up sneaking into a film, her first, and are completely transfixed. If you’re wondering when the story starts to kick in, so was most of the audience because it takes 90 minutes before it has any direction at all. You’re just about to give up on it when it takes a startling left turn and becomes something joyous and majestic. (Without giving anything away I’ll say that seeing the film is just the tip of the iceberg for what the two are about to uncover but it just takes too damn long to get there.) This is all the more crushing considering the impressive work Scorsese has done with the 3D but for the first half, “Hugo” is directionless and patchy. There’s still some work to be done to the film but it’s problems seem to be rooted in the script and with a little over a month to go before release I’m not sure there’ll be any way to fix it. Too narratively leaden for either children or adults the film will likely go down as another admirable curio (with a few classic sequences late in the film) in the director’s filmography.
