Of course, Martin Scorsese has made pictures about children before. Who can forget that scamp Iris in “Taxi Driver,” romping in the big city and learning an exciting occupation, or the impish Henry Hill, slowly strengthening his superpower of dishonesty as he learns the dark arts from a series of older mentors in “GoodFellas”?
Come to think of it, maybe Scorsese is only interested in children who yield adult themes. Maybe it shouldn’t surprise us that “Hugo,” which is supposed to be about a likable orphaned scamp, is in fact a movie about an aged moviemaker, film preservation and repairing busted things. It’s as if David Copperfield wandered into a History of Film lecture. Maybe it isn’t a great idea to wait till you’re nearly 70 to make your first kid movie.
“Hugo” features many of the trappings of great storytelling — lavish sets, amusingly oddball characters, a stately pace. It’s a pleasure to look at. But young Hugo (Asa Butterfield), a boy who literally lives inside the clocks he manages in a grand Paris train station in the 1930s, embodies one problem that bedeviled even Dickens: He’s boringly nice.
Hugo, who lives by his wits and petty theft, is daily chased by a cop (Sacha Baron Cohen) who rounds up orphans and menaced by a bad-tempered toy repairer (Ben Kingsley) who threatens to burn his prized notebook.
That book, which is full of elaborate mechanical drawings of a robot, or automaton, is a link to the boy’s dead father (Jude Law), who taught Hugo everything about clocks and machinery. If Hugo can ever repair the automaton the two were working on when the father died, he can receive an encoded message from the old man. But this requires a heart-shaped key that happens to be in the possession of the kindly goddaughter (Chloë Grace Moretz) of the cranky man, Georges, who runs the toy shop.
Scorsese (whose script, by John Logan, is based on a children’s book by Brian Selznick) misses several easy opportunities to make the audience fall in love with Hugo. The boy is being raised by his nasty, drunken uncle (Ray Winstone), but we hardly get a glimpse of this figure, who barely registers as a source of anguish for Hugo. Moreover, we see little bonding between Hugo and his father because Jude Law is also in the film for only a couple of minutes.
Hugo’s main source of unease is the bumbling cop, who is easily outwitted (once Hugo baffles him from a distance of 3 feet simply by putting on a beret). To stir things up, Scorsese throws in a couple of thrills that (exasperatingly) turn out to be only dreams, and a climactic chase is merely moderately suspenseful.
Nor is Scorsese much for romance. Despite the connotations of a heart-shaped key, the two leading children never seem to connect on a level deeper than ordinary friendship. Worse than that, the major element that changes in the movie, involving the boy’s relationship with the old toy-shop owner, is accomplished accidentally — not because Hugo is trying to save Georges’ soul.
All of these aspects are ones that Dickens would have made blossom with emotion: Scrooge’s transformation, Pip’s awed adoration for Estella in “Great Expectations,” the cruelty of authority figures suppressing children’s dreams.
Scorsese saves his warmest embrace for a digression (it has almost nothing to do with Hugo) on the history of early cinema. Stage magicians-turned-directors conjured up revolutionary special effects and outlandish costumes so they could tell fantastic myths of bizarre creatures and interplanetary travel. The director’s evident delight in recapturing the techniques of movie pioneers is catching. But to anyone but a film nerd, these early productions make Ed Wood look like a genius.
Gorgeous as “Hugo” is, it never feels like childhood, never delivers the terror, the sense of injustice at grown-up rules, the exhilaration of discovery when all is new. Scorsese is one of the great cynics and ironists, but place him at kids’-eye level and you have taken away his chief skill. You can almost hear the creak of his knees as he gets down on the floor with the toys.