Why Hugo Stinks
Despite fawning
reviews and a Golden Globe award, Martin Scorsese's indigestible blob
of treacle stinks. Not one frame of this bloated, purposeless film has a gram
of authentic charm. That won’t stop the Academy of Motion Picture blah blah
blah from heaping praises on it.
The child
actors, preciously over-dressed and made up, look like pampered dogs going
through their show routines. Every moment the camera lingers on those pretty
little faces betrays the heavy hand of their handlers, presumably starting
with Scorsese, who seems to have as much chemistry with kids as he does with wives.
The adult
actors show calculated mastery of film and TV conventions, telegraphing their
intentions to an audience the director assumes is so deadened and starved by contemporary culture as to be impervious to any but the most belabored
semaphores. Ben Kingsley seems to be perpetually watching himself in the
mirror; Sacha Baron Cohen’s wooden station master looks terrified of losing his
mustache; Ray Winstone, the evil-incarnate uncle, finds one note and toots it
like a bratty 5-year-old with a kazoo.
The repetitive
musical score grinds familiar grooves: tinkling chimes for magic, throbbing
legato in the heart-warming bits, pizzicatos of excitement for moments like the
chase scene with the Doberman pinscher in the mall – sorry, train station.
Sentiment like this is available in a gingerbread box with built-in digitized
Christmas carols -- a fair description of this film as a whole.
As warm-hearted
and uplifting as a prostitute in fairy-tale drag, Hugo screams "fake me" while wriggling
seductively through its 3-D effects. The faux Belle Epoch décor and costumes
pander to that peculiarly American yearning for the fake that drives hordes to
palaces of banality like Disney World and Las Vegas. Over-engineered set pieces
and badly-directed actors seem rented from a literary/cinematic chop-shop:
great ideas from literature (and the decent book by Brian Selznick) have been
stolen, dismantled, and repackaged as trivial bon-bons.
Hugo is a huge, steaming plate of candy-crap
dolloped with sugar sauce. Underneath, it’s an over-lingering glimpse of American movie-making that celebrates excess and mocks its
audience's ever-rising threshold for mediocrity. Whether there was any shred of redeeming
originality or humility before the end of this overblown sugar-puff of a movie,
or not, I cannot say, as I left well before it ended, clutching my
friend's elbow, fearing for our souls. If it got better before the end, well,
good for Mr. Scorsese, and exc-u-use me!
Sadly, the fact
that Hugo stinks is exactly
why it is likely to garner the biggest, loudest, smelliest blasts of praise at
the Academy awards. It's a pile of crap, but to Americans inured to the
self-congratulatory Hollywood blockbuster assembly-line, it's a piece of cake.
So let those eat it who will; I will happily gnaw bread.
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