Hugo - not a typical Scorsese film

I'm very busy at work just now re-writing a whole chunk of Visual Basic code, plus with the Euro 2012 competition on there's very little time for me to watch any films let alone get any reviews together. I did get a few hours the other night though to watch 'Hugo', the Martin Scorsese 3D extravaganza that won 5 Oscars and was billed as a celebration of wide-eyed innocence and cinematic storytelling.  I didn't see it in 3D of course, can't do that with a DVD.

This is a film that looks amazing. It opens with an extravagant tracking shot of Paris in the 1930s, something that in itself is a masterpiece of special effects / model building / however they did it. We fly into a Parisian station and follow the life of Hugo, a boy who lives in the station clock because his Father and Uncle have both died in tragic circumstances. Hugo's dream is to complete his father's unfinished project, which is to restore an animatronic boy to working order and discover the message it hides. To do this, Hugo steals tools and trinkets from the station watch-maker (Ben Kingsley) while avoiding the attentions of the uncompromising station master (Sacha Baron Cohen). Not too much about a celebration of cinema in that plot; but soon Ben Kinsley's character is revealed to have a deep and close connection to the early days of cinema, which Hugo becomes obsessed by resolving.

Lots of good stuff so far, but this is a film that takes an excruciatingly long time to get to its one point, which is that cinema is great. It's trying too hard to be quirky with its depictions of the foibles of the Parisian train station with its community of shop-keepers and busy-body station master. Perhaps Cohen wasn't the right person to cast in the role, or perhaps Scorsese wanted him to ham up his performance, but each time he raises an eyebrow at something wacky or falls over a dog he's chasing the film becomes more unnatural. It starts to feel forced, over-the-top and scripted without much thought for what will actually work on screen.

It's a shame that I started to find the film boring as each quirky moment cumulatively got more and more on my nerves. It was a shame because the plot of the film is actually a neat little mystery that a couple of excited children busy themselves about solving - in other words, the stuff of classic storytelling. There are a couple of nice touches at the end that the film historians out there will probably get very excited about, in particular a tracking shot though a window that takes after the classic Citizen Kane moment, but this kind of stuff doesn't make up for the enforced quirkiness that bored me for the opening hour.

I can understand why the Academy gave it 5 Oscars; they love heaping praise on films that eulogise about the magic of cinema and I agree with them that the attention to detail in the sets and costumes is spectacular. What I don't really understand is why more people aren't underwhelmed by the trite side-plots and crow-barred quirkiness. In conclusion: Hugo had plenty of good points, but I'll not be watching it again.