HUGO: a cracking story and a celebration of cinema

I'm not sure exactly what's inspired cinema's current fascination with its own past but I'm very happy about it.
This year's Oscar nominations are dominated by two films celebrating the earliest days of the movies. 'The Artist' is a beautiful and incredibly faithful recreation of 1920s silent Hollywood, and is reviewed elsewhere on this blog. The other is HUGO, a fictional tale about cinema's first genius film maker Georges Melies, and directed by cinema's current greatest living director, Martin Scorsese.

Scorsese's had a lifelong fascination with cinema and is one of the driving forces in the preservation of old films which might otherwise have crumbled to dust, so it's perhaps surprising that it's taken him so long to get around to actually making a film about about his passion.
In choosing to focus on Georges Melies, Scorsese has employed many of the same techniques that made Melies a pioneer in the industry. He was one of the first to recognise the storytelling potential of the newly invented movie camera, which had up till then been used simply to record simple scenes of everyday life, such as workers leaving a factory, or a train pulling into a station. Melies released his first film in 1896 and over the ensuing twenty years made another 500 more, telling increasingly sophisticated stories and employing ever more elaborate special effects, many of which he invented.
While considerably less prolific than Melies (who isn't?) Scorsese has similarly demonstrated a willingness to explore a wide variety of topics over his career, and now with HUGO he not only employs 3D for the first time but also creates his first truly child-friendly family film.
HUGO (Asa Butterfield) is an orphan living surreptitiously behind the scenes at a grand railway station in 1930s Paris. He maintains the station's giant clocks (a skill he learnt from his late father) and survives by stealing food from the shops on the station concourse. His obsession with restoring an automoton left to him by his father brings him into contact with Georges Melies (Ben Kingsley), an elderly man who runs a toy repair shop in the station. Melies is an angry and bitter man who seems inexplicably determined to prevent Hugo from completing his mission, but he's figured without the young boy's resilience and resourcefulness, and piece by piece Hugo begins to discover that the old man may have a past he wants to keep concealed.

Scorsese's skill is in concealing his history lesson (about Melies invaluable contribution to the development of the cinema) inside an exciting adventure story that's about something else entirely. HUGO is absolutely not a biopic about the life and work of Georges Melies, but through the eyes of young Hugo we learn almost as much about the pioneer film maker as we would have done from a biography, but how big an audience would there have been for such a film?
Scorsese the cineaste succeeds in blending his passion for the history of film-making with the expectations of the multi-screen audience not much interested in that kind of thing to create a dazzling film designed to appeal to everyone, and which looks as good as the story it tells. And who knows - you might even leave the cinema convinced of the importance in preserving old films while there's still time. Now that is the mark of Scorsese's brilliance as a film maker!

SHUTTER ISLAND: nightmares in a damaged brain

Director Martin Scorsese's first foray into the horror genre is a major disappointment. SHUTTER ISLAND trots out every cliche in the "How to Make a Horror Thriller" handbook with not even a single smudged fingerprint to indicate this is the handiwork of the greatest living American film director.
If it weren't for the presence of the (still) unfeasibly babyfaced Leonardo DiCaprio I'd swear I was watching the 1966 cinematic bastard lovechild of William Castle and a young Roman Polanski. Imagine "Cul de Sac" meets "Strait Jacket." 

With a blaring discordant soundtrack and cast of demented murderous souls locked away on a remote island institution and guarded by a staff whose own sanity appears dubious, I half expected a late era Joan Crawford or Bette Davis to loom out of the darkness on the other end of one of the pairs of arms reaching through the bars to grab at the hero as he stumbles down a damp, dark corridor in a mental hospital.
SHUTTER ISLAND is derivative, hokey, overblown and peopled with stock characters. There's Ben Kingsley as the smooth head doctor whose professions of concern for his patients may or may not be sincere; Max von Sydow as the German-accented psychiatrist who may or may not be a Nazi war criminal; Ted Levine as the warden whose honesty and openness may be concealing a sadistic dark side, and DiCaprio as the outsider, menaced on all sides and starting to doubt his own sanity. 
In the hands of William Castle this would all add up to a taut, entertaining B-movie chiller but it's not worthy of a director of Scorsese's stature. His 2004 film "The Aviator" for which he was undeservedly Oscar nominated looks like "Raging Bull" compared to SHUTTER ISLAND.