Film Review | Hugo, dir. Martin Scorsese

I almost saw Hugo at the movies. Almost, but not quite. For one reason or another, I waited for the Blu-ray, and come the appointed day, as beautiful as the thing looked, here at home it felt... flat. And I think there's a reason for that. It's overgenerous in my estimation, but you could call Hugo a love letter to cinema, and maybe if I'd seen it on the big screen the experience would have been more memorable. As is, I almost liked it, but not quite.

In many ways the latest from Martin Scorsese marks an outlandish change of pace for the filmmaker. He's one of the greats, of course, and if we were in any danger of forgetting that fact, he's had rather a renaissance of late, with The Departed, Shutter Island and his involvement in HBO's Boardwalk Empire.

In such storied company, Hugo seems almost an aberration: it's an uplifting, Amelie-esque movie about movies, complete with cartoonish characters, a saccharine-sweet narrative, and that most romantic backdrop, classic Paris. It's about a little orphan boy who lives in the walls of an ornate train station in said city, and longs for one last message from his dearly departed father. This Hugo (Asa Butterfeld) hopes he'll have if he can just fix the broken automaton they were working on in advance of the accident that left him bereft.

However, were it so simple, he'd have done it already, but Hugo's life - hard enough as it is - is made still more miserable by Sacha Baron Cohen's nameless Station Inspector, meanwhile Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley), the owner of a small magic shop, seems to have it in for him. When the monstrous Monseiur holds Hugo's precious notebook hostage, our little fellow's only hope is his adopted daughter, Hit-Girl. No! I mean Isabelle! In any case, Chloë Grace Moretz - who you might also recall from Let Me In - as a precocious creature desperate to have an adventure the equal of those from the stories. Together then, Hugo and Isabelle uncover a mystery involving the automaton, an early film long thought lost, and a strange, sad man haunted by his past.

Hugo is a no expenses spared adaptation of The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick: the 2007 Caldecott award-winner described by its author as "not exactly a novel, not quite a picture book, not really a graphic novel, or a flip book or a movie, but a combination of all these things." Whatever it is or is not, I'm afraid I haven't read the thing - poor show sir! - so I can't speak to where exactly the issues I had with Hugo originated, but at a glance, the filmmakers don't appear to have taken any great liberties with the source material.

Perhaps that's the problem, because Hugo is truly two movies, about an hour long each. The first is a meandering farce, featuring Cohen in Borat mode, whilst the second is a deeply human and moderately moving story, starring Ben Kingsley at his best, Helen McRory as his wistful wife, and a star-studded cast of bit-part players. The kids hardly factor into this latter half, and it's as well, because they're only ever so-so. As Isabelle, Moretz does her best Hermione, which is fine, but Butterfeld's moody Hugo is an accumulation of nervous energy and emo eyeliner. In his absence Hugo seems like it might just together; to wit, the older actors bear the lion's share of the movie's most powerful moments, in vignettes that have more heart than Hugo's whole story.

These asides are nice, but the entire enterprise is oriented around Hugo himself, and Butterfeld just isn't up to snuff. Nor is the narrative paced or structured in such a way as to take the onus off this miscast young actor. As I was saying, around the midpoint of the film, everything changes - for the better, from my perspective - but while children might be entertained by the first bit, they'll be bored to tears by the second, meanwhile older viewers are apt to appreciate the touching meta-movie with which Hugo concludes, though most everything before that point will drive them to distraction.

Were Hugo one thing or the other, I could simply say this isn't for me, and let that be that, or praise Scorsese for an affectionate celebration of cinema. As it is - which is to say a bit of this, and a bit of that - I honestly don't know who this film is for, and I doubt the director does either. Though the occasional 3D sequences stick out like sore thumbs, it certainly looks the part, and Howard Shore's score is a modest success as well, but beyond its incredible presentation, Hugo is oddly hollow; a beautiful, but broken automaton.

Film Review | Shutter Island

"Someone is missing," intones the theatrical poster for Shutter Island, the latest - and surely one of the greatest - from Goodfellas director extraordinaire Martin Scorsese, latterly of The Departed. But who? Who's missing?


Well, I ain't telling.


Nor, for that matter, are they.


I mean sure, they'd love for you to swallow the story they've cooked up to explain what in God's name is going on on Shutter Island, which is to say the infamous mental institution where you and your partner Chuck have been shipped off to. But you're a US Marshal. In your gut, in your heart, you know there's something more disturbing in play than the inexplicable escape of a violent lunatic by the name of Rachel Solondo - apparently vanished into thin air from a locked room surrounded by staff who swear they saw nothing. And where could she have gone, anyway? There's only the one boat to-ing and fro-ing over the sea each day - called off since your arrival because of a century storm in any event - and beyond the grounds of the asylum there's nothing but perilous cliffs and dank mausoleums, turned over in search of Solondo ten times already.

The closer you and Chuck get to the truth, the further a leap the facts of the case you've been sent to investigate seem. Something more, you're sure of it, is going on on Shutter Island. Something darker and more baffling than the disappearance of a woman who still believes the three of her children she murdered are alive by far...


Truth be told, I don't read a great deal of crime fiction, nor too many mysteries, but I'm thinking I might just have to look this Dennis Lehane fellow up. I would, too, on the strength of Shutter Island alone, the 2003 novel of his Scorsese based this stellar adaptation on, but add to that Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone, two more books I've only seen the movies of - excellent each in their way - and evidently we're looking at an author I can hardly stand to ignore any longer.


Shutter Island is many things. A sumptuously realised period piece; an evocative, chillingly atmospheric noirish conspiracy thriller; a complex ensemble of character actors at their peak performing brilliantly unnerving bit parts; an uneasy unravelling of questions of identity and responsibility. But it is, above all else, a trick. 

Shutter Island is in its entirety an elaborate ruse, in which the viewer is as complicit as any of the doctors and patients and police in and around the asylum. And as with all such films - The Sixth Sense comes first to mind - there's a chance you'll see through it. I did. At around the hour mark, I took a pot shot at the twist ending, and the cracking reveal, when it came, bore out my suspicions.


I think it speaks to just how marvellous this film is that, having seen the end on the cards long before Scorsese showed his hand, I still came away from Shutter Island slack-jawed in awe. Not to suggest that the conclusion is obvious, nor indeed in the least unsatisfying in terms of its conception or execution - as a matter of fact a minor-scale rebuttal of the twist's great orchestral crescendo would redeem Shutter Island in that regard (were it in any need of redemption, which it's not) - but it was the getting-there that got me anyway; the journey rather than the destination I so adored.


And who to hold on high for that?

I hardly need to stress what a remarkable filmmaker Martin Scorsese is on a good day. And Shutter Island tells of the very best of days. With it and The Departed, the man, the legend, seems to have handily recaptured the high points - the energy, the finesse - of his earlier work, and it's a genuine pleasure to see him so reinvigorated.


Scorsese, then, as good as goes without saying. Leonardo DiCaprio, on the other hand, has with this and Inception finally come into his own, and for all his charm and boyish good looks, he seems a revelation. I challenge you not to be taken in by his meticulously nuanced performance: conflicted, addled and invariably intense, DiCaprio alone carries the greater part of Shutter Island. Had he not been the task's equal, who knows how this stunning film would have fared?


It's all about him, after all...

Film Review: Inception

I've been looking forward to Inception since before The Speculative Scotsman launched. Way back when, I singled it out as my most anticipated film of the year - nothing set to play in theatres during 2010 came close to evoking such excitement in me. The last time I was so psyched about a film, The Dark Knight was just about to come out, and I firmly believe the most recent Batman movie is one of the greatest pieces of cinema in existence, its comic book roots be damned. Furthermore, I'm of the opinion that Christopher Nolan, who also gave us Memento, Insomnia and The Prestige, is singularly the most accomplished filmmaker of our generation, and he has been living with the bare bones of the concept that Inception enacts for a long time. Only now, with the tremendous success of The Dark Knight to bolster him, has Nolan had the budget and the license to realise his dream.

And what a dream it is...

There were fears, just before Inception opened, that we were looking at a modern-day Blade Runner, which is to say a great critical success and potentially a cult sensation, but a flop at the box office; a financial doomsday device when you're talking about a film which spares so little in the way of expense as Inception. In the end, I suppose only time will tell, but if there's a single thing that has worked to discourage people from seeing this movie, it's that they don't have the slightest clue what it's about. I've been following its development more closely than most, and I confess: as I walked into the theatre on opening day, I hardly knew what to expect myself. The marketing has been powerful, in its way - "From the Director of The Dark Knight" and all that - but counter-intuitively rather vague; deceptive, even. The trailers have been impressive and yet utterly baffling, the posters iconic but insubstantial. From the earliest stages of development through to Inception's eventual release, this movie has been shrouded in mystery and enigma. Various of its cast members are on record saying even they didn't fully grasp what was going on, for goodness' sake. Only now that the movie's actually out there have people begun to understand what Inception is.

And it's not half so complicated as we've been led to believe.

In fact, here: it's the future. It's not a future too far removed from our own era, either - the only real advance of note between now and then is an interface which allows certain people (extractors) to insert themselves in other people's dream. "It's not strictly legal," as Leonardo DiCaprio's Cobb explains to trainee architect Juno - I mean, uh... Ellen Page as Ariadne - but an infrastructure has developed around the technology nevertheless.  Extractors are hired to steal secrets from the subconscious of their subjects. They immerse themselves in the imagined landscapes of rich businessmen's dreamworlds - or else artificial dreamscapes crafted by architects such as Ariadne to resemble as much - to pilfer patents and intellectual property. Not exactly fodder for an intellectual Summer blockbuster, huh? Well, some high-flyers are thus trained in the art of resisting extractors. Their defenses take the form of anonymous, gun-toting agents who are apt to explode things, given the opportunity. So, sorted.

Now Cobb has a secret. It's something to do with his dead wife, played - I can't say how - by Marion Cotillard. It's the reason he can't go home to be with his practically orphaned children; he's been hiding out on foreign shores with a team of extractors including Joseph Gordon Levitt's naturally suave Arthur, stealing secrets for great whacks of cash with which he hopes to pay off the skeletons in his closet. But some secrets can't be bought out. In fact, Cobb is about ready to call the whole thing off when Saito (played to perfection by Ken Watanabe) makes him a once-in-a-lifetime proposal. Instead of extraction, Saito enlists Cobb and his team to plant the seed of an idea in the subconscious of Cillian Murphy's anxious Robert Fisher, recently bereaved and newly in charge of a priceless business empire. The idea is strictly theoretical, but if Cobb can do it, he can see his kids again. It's a gimme that he'll try.

Alright. Perhaps Inception is a bit more demanding than your usual popcorn fare. Nolan seems to have skipped the mediocre origin story of Batman Begins with this potential franchise in favour of a more roundly satisfying sequel straight out of the gate. Inception, by all rights, could have been Extraction 2, the follow-up to a film which would have served to familiarise us with Cobb's ensemble and more formally introduce the world outwith the somewhat contextless dreamscape we spend the vast majority of our time in as it stands. But though Nolan makes a stimulating game of out its explanation, the initial concept which informs all the action is straightforward enough in itself, and the spin on which the narrative largely pivots isn't hard to get your head around. Inception is simply the inverse of extraction, with raised stakes: Cobb and company must go in and give rather than take and get the hell out. Keeping track of the various stages of the subconscious the intrepid extractors must plumb can be somewhat problematic - take a single leap of faith, however, and the rest fall into place - but otherwise, Inception isn't half as mind-boggling as I think we all expected. Devotees of science-fiction in film or literature will have no trouble with it.

So what's left? Well, everything. Inception isn't somehow a disappointment because all the publicity has made a mountain out of a molehill. Inception, to being with, has no moles in. Nor is it anything less than enrapturing from start to finish. Nolan's script is indescribably clever; spare, direct and laden with significance. Alongside the sumptuous visuals and some incredibly realised special effects - be prepared to see the world from a startling new perspective - it works to engage you immediately, and from the explosive pre-credits sequence to the movie's smartly subdued last moments, the pace never lets up. Inception is solid entertainment through and through: action-packed, effortlessly immersive and intelligent rather than bafflingly overwrought.

The cast, too, are great. Between Shutter Island and this speculative masterpiece, DiCaprio has finally come into his own as the leading man Hollywood has insisted on casting him as. At long last, we can believe in him, invest in his character, and it's just as well: if DiCaprio hadn't pulled Cobb off, Inception would be a much poorer film for his failure, for none of his companions - short, perhaps, Cotillard (be she dream, memory, delusion or illusion) - are in the least sympathetic. Michael Caine chuckles for a few minutes of screen time as Cobb's mentoring father-figure; Ellen Page, Cillian Murphy and Joseph Gordon Levitt all talk the talk and walk the walk, though they exist, you come to understand, more as functions of the narrative's strict requirements than actual people.

And that's the trouble with Inception. It's brilliantly conceived intellectual eye-candy with striations of action and intrigue, but excepting a single character arc - Cobb's, thank God - it's as cold as a fish frozen in formaldehyde. There's no emotional depth to anyone other than DiCaprio's anti-hero - even Mal, whom Cotillard plays to a dreamlike T, is more an aspect of Cobb's character than a character unto herself. It's all business.

But rest easy: there's no shortage of pleasure to be had with every other facet of this fabulous mindfuck of a movie. Christopher Nolan is a remarkable writer and director, almost without parallel in contemporary cinema, and Inception sees him at the height of his filmmaking prowess. It can be a chilly experience on occasion, perhaps, but get your thermals on and button up - in the end, it's well worth weathering the cold for this perception-bending tour de force.