At the moment of greatest rapture in Martin Scorsese’s 3-D “Hugo”—a film with many moments of happiness—a twelve-year-old Parisian boy, Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), and his pal Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz) are leafing through a book of film history, when images from the pages start to move and then spring to full motion-picture life. The time is the nineteen-thirties, and Scorsese and his technicians are looking back to the pioneers, jumping through restored versions of films by the Lumière brothers, Edwin S. Porter, D. W. Griffith, and, most centrally, Georges Méliès, the inventor of fantasy and science fiction in the cinema. For Scorsese, the early movies are a procession of miracles: the directors realized that sixteen frames passing through a camera every second could yield illusions, disappearances, transformations, magic. In recent years, while making his own movies, Scorsese has dedicated himself to film history and preservation. He has put this ardent attention at the center of a beautifully told and emotionally satisfying story for children and their movie-loving parents. “Hugo” is both a summing up of the cinematic past and a push forward into new 3-D technologies. James Cameron’s “Avatar” was a luscious purple-green spectacle—a fantasy of the natural world. “Hugo” is a fantasy of the mechanical world: much of it is devoted to the workings of a clock, a camera, an automaton, and a train station that functions like a huge machine. No other work of art has demonstrated so explicitly how gears, springs, shutters, wheels, and tracks can generate wonders.
Like many children’s classics, “Hugo,” based on the extraordinary novel “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” (2007), by Brian Selznick, is the story of an orphan. Hugo’s father (Jude Law), a horologist, dies, and the boy inherits his passion; he runs the clocks in the Gare Montparnasse, including the two giants, one facing into the station and the other onto the street. Like the Hunchback of Notre-Dame or the Phantom of the Opera, Hugo lives a secret life in a public place—a rubbishy room up in the clockworks, where he tinkers with inventions old and new. He’s a self-reliant boy, wary, inarticulate but courageous, and he knows every corner of the vast station. The terminal has its own society and permanent residents, including the station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), a pompous prig who rounds up boys like Hugo and sends them to an orphanage, and a cranky old man who presides in silence over a toy store—Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley) himself, mourning his lost past. Between 1896 and 1913, Méliès made more than five hundred short films, including the lovely, antic “Voyage to the Moon,” but his company went bust and the French Army seized most of the film prints, melted them down, and turned the liquid celluloid into boot heels. After that, Méliès was forgotten.
Selznick’s book begins with a series of pencil drawings that feels like an introductory film sequence—establishing shots, medium shots, and closeups. Scorsese begins the same way, but in color, and instantly we get a sense of the film’s characteristic look. Working with the cinematographer Robert Richardson, from a screenplay by John Logan, Scorsese shoots from the children’s point of view as often as possible. He brings the third dimension into play not only in action sequences but as an enlargement of everyday life. The grownups pushing past the kids as they rush to make a train are as threatening as the Roman legions; at one point, Isabelle slips, and impatient feet trample on her. Narrow spaces and hidden places would naturally matter enormously to a furtive child, and Scorsese chases after Hugo down tunnels and along passageways and up a stairway to his room—the view up the stairway keeps telescoping in depth. Hugo is a spectator, always peering out at something, and the Paris he sees from his aerie is tinted dark blue, with glistening white lights—the colors of wonder. Parts of “Hugo”—the station, interiors of apartments—were shot on sets, but the movie depends on painted and digitized backgrounds. They are intentionally artificial, like something in a children’s book, or, more to the point, like the fanciful sets that Méliès used in his movies. In a flashback, Scorsese re-creates Méliès’s glass-walled studio and his films, with their exuberance of creatures, “natives” with spears, nymphs hanging from the stars—sheer exultant zaniness, part magic show, part burlesque, and all cinema.
Some of the scenes between Hugo and Isabelle are more methodical and explicit than they need be, and the pieties of a film historian (Michael Stuhlbarg) who has made reviving Méliès’s movies his life’s work are repetitive and cloying. But these are minor flaws. The emotional pull of the story is irresistible: the boy needs a family, the illustrious filmmaker needs to regain his past, and a love of movies brings them together. “Hugo” is superbly playful. Scorsese stages the moment in 1896 when, at least according to legend, Méliès’s rivals, the Lumière brothers, showed a film of a train rushing toward the camera and sent the audience scrambling. Just the year before, a train had actually crashed through the passenger area at Gare Montparnasse and sailed out into the street. In “Hugo,” the hero has a terrifying dream, perhaps an unconscious recollection of that event. Reality, filmed illusion, and dreams are so intertwined that only an artist, playing merrily with echoes, can sort them into a scheme of delight.
The smile isn’t as wide, the bust not as large, the waist not as long, and the flesh doesn’t have the incredible palpability that drove everyone mad, but, yes, Michelle Williams can play Marilyn Monroe. In “My Week with Marilyn,” Williams makes the star come alive. She has Monroe’s walk, the easy, swivelling neck, the face that responds to everything like a flower swaying in the breeze. Most important, she has the sexual sweetness and the hurt, lost look that shifts, in a flash, into resistance and tears. This charming and touching Anglo-American production, written by Adrian Hodges, and directed by Simon Curtis, is based on two memoirs by Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), a young man with good connections who, in 1956, became Laurence Olivier’s assistant, when Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) was directing and acting in a film version of a Terence Rattigan stage farce. “The Prince and the Showgirl,” the movie was called—a Ruritanian romance now largely forgotten, in which Olivier, with a thick Eastern European accent and a monocle, falls in love with an untutored entertainer played by Monroe. Among other things, “Marilyn” is an amused and amusing exposition of the struggle between two ways of life: the tough professionalism of British theatre veterans (be on time, know your lines, and just pretend) and the Method style favored by Americans, in which emotions are derived from some trauma or pleasure in the actor’s life. Paula Strasberg—the wife of Lee, and Monroe’s New York acting guru—accompanies Marilyn to London, and she’s always on the set, talking into her ear (“Think about the things you like. . . . Frank Sinatra. Coca-Cola”) and getting in Olivier’s way. Branagh has become jowly in middle age, but his looks are passably close to Olivier’s, and he has mastered Olivier’s elegantly phrased, caressing graciousness and his indignant bellow. Everything about Monroe exasperates Olivier. Though he knows that she is not an actress in the normal sense, he envies her intimacy with the camera, and he wants to show her off. But she’s hopeless: she turns up on the set hours late, blows her lines, and hears only what she wants to hear. She’s so alert to any possible rebuff that she can hardly take direction at all.
Monroe, lost, needs a pal, and young Colin, abashed yet persistent, keeps showing up in her dressing room. Eventually, they go off on a chauffeured romp in the countryside. Eddie Redmayne has a virginal look, and a knocked-silly amazement when the most famous woman in the world shucks her clothes in front of him and jumps into a freezing river. Imagine skinny-dipping with Marilyn Monroe! Monroe plays with him, gains his allegiance, but then falls apart, and he tries, like many people before and after, to take care of her. The filmmakers’ touch is a little demure: Monroe could be tough and nasty as well as gentle, and we don’t see that side of her. “My Week with Marilyn” essentially preserves the point of view of an astonished boy. It’s an expertly made, intentionally minor movie, though when Monroe, doping herself with everything available, lies in bed, confused and hapless, there are depressing intimations of the end to come. ♦
