Review of Hugo (2011) by Pegasus — 27 Dec 2011

This movie is beautiful to look at, has a good cast among the adults, and has some nice moments with the train station setting. But the plotting and pacing kills it. For one thing, the two plots seem to be forced together in a non-credible way.

That may be the fault of the source material, but a good director ought not to reproduce strained plotting out of some sense of faithfulness to the text. It was just too abrupt for me the way Hugo is all about the automaton and then suddenly he's all about movies.

Too much coincidence, not well integrated. Then, there are two places where the movie basically stops for a lecture about film history. Nothing against the topic, but voice-over to explain it is a poor dramatic technique in a non-documentary film.

Finally, the secret behind Papa Georges' reaction to Hugo's notebook and to seeing his old drawings didn't have sufficient dramatic heft. "He went bankrupt because tastes changed" is sad, OK, but hardly the tragedy presaged by all the preceding build-up.

He didn't change with the times so his studio failed. This happens all over in every industry. I was left with a big feeling of "Is that all there is?" He seemed pitiful (and self-pitying) rather than tragic.

I realize we are meant to view the melting of his films as an awful warning about preserving the classic films we know and love, but the point was laid on with too heavy a hand. Besides all this, the screenplay was uneven, sometimes awkward, there were too many extraneous bits such as the bookseller and the wicked uncle, and the pace was very slow.

All these factors kept me from becoming fully involved. I can't imagine a child having the patience to try to follow this. In short, for a movie about the magic of movies, there just wasn't enough magic.