Hugo 3D (U)

HHH

Dir: Martin Scorsese

With: Asa Butterfield, Chloe Moretz, Ben Kingsley

MARTIN Scorsese and family movies go together like lions and antelopes, oil and water, striking public sector workers and George Osborne, right? Only if you consider a fraction of the pictures the Mean Streets and Goodfellas director has made during a half-century of filmmaking.

It's an important fraction, an Oscar winning portion, but as any viewer of films from The Aviator to Shutter Island will know, the older he gets, the more Scorsese doesn't like to be fenced in.

How much you consider Hugo a family movie depends, then, which family you ask. Although indeed a movie that may delight your clan, those with younger cinemagoers in the pack might find more happiness is to be found in Happy Feet.

It's the wider family of movie lovers, the cinephile branch in particular, who will find most to adore about Hugo. This is a Scorsese family movie in that it is his salute to an art form that has been his mother and father, his life. In short, don't expect dancing penguins.

Given the source material, Brian Selznick's bestseller, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, you might expect the visuals to be a treat. Scorsese also has his usual team on board, including Dante Ferretti on production design. This Scorsese film stands out, however, in that it's his first in 3D.

On that score it is a revelation. Finally you can see the point of 3D as the eye travels into an Aladdin's Cave of visual treasures. The train that screams towards the camera, the snow that swirls like petals, the inner workings of a clock made to look like a cathedral – Scorsese uses 3D as it should be deployed, as a way to heighten thrills, not as a gimmick that tries to make up for thin characters or a poor story.

Hugo is the tale of an orphan who once upon a time had a father and a home. Dad and son shared a passion for building mechanical objects and making things work. Now Hugo (Asa Butterfield) lives alone in the clock tower at Montparnasse station, dodging the attentions of a local policeman (Sacha Baron Cohen), who delights in sending children to the orphanage. When not steering clear of the station inspector, Hugo is dodging the scowls of the man who runs the toy stall (Ben Kingsley), a man known to his goddaughter Isabelle (Chloe Moretz) as Papa Georges.

Hugo, though terrified by Georges and his talk of "ghosts", is also intrigued. So begins an adventure for Isabelle and Hugo. Their mission: to find out who Georges is, and why he is so sad.

Set in the years after the First World War, loss cloaks Scorsese's picture like mourning garb. Georges is bereft, Hugo misses his father, Isabelle has no parents. Even the station inspector is in mourning for a limb lost on the battlefield. Like the passengers who rush through the station, each character yearns for a purpose, a destination, a place to call home.

An early clue to where that place might be lies in Hugo's memories of the trips he and his father took to the cinema. The movies were "our special place", says Hugo, regaling Isabelle with his father's fantastic tales of a rocket smashing into the face of the moon, and trains that looked so real on screen they had the audience fleeing in terror.

From Sunset Boulevard to Cinema Paradiso and The Player, cinema loves to love itself. Scorsese takes the adoration back to when it all began, with the Lumiere brothers and Georges Melies, creator of Le Voyage dans la Lune and more than 500 other films. This was cinema as invention. Where the Lumiere brothers looked on filmmaking as a puzzle to be solved, Melies considered it to be a door to people's dreams. No prizes for guessing which viewpoint Scorsese favours.

The tale of the orphan boy and Montparnasse life chugs along pleasantly enough, with lots of visual goodies to enjoy along the way. Hark at Joyce sharing a table with Dali, Edison recording the band, two eccentrics in the shape of Frances de la Tour and Richard Griffiths trying to court each other even though her lapdog disapproves.

It is in the film's second half, however, that Hugo roars into its own as a billet doux to cinema. In finding out what Georges has lost, many other treasures are found. Without ever posing the question directly, Scorsese shows why audiences fell in love with cinema. Roll up, roll up for spectacle, for comedy, for romance, for excitement, for maybe, just maybe, happy endings.

Feast, above all, on those moving pictures. It's not all about effects, though. Courtesy of Scorsese and a first rate cast, including Christopher Lee as an enigmatic bookseller, plenty of good old fashioned heartstring tugging goes on too. For everyone who loves the movies, here's a movie that loves them fit to burst.

FEATURE: PAGE 22