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After seeing the trailer for Hugo, film purists collectively bristled at the prospect of a children’s fantasy from the director of Taxi Driver and The Departed. Many of them, including myself, wondered why Martin Scorsese would want to invest his time and creative energy into a heart-warning G-rated movie arriving just in time for Christmas? The answer turns out to be simple as it is welcome; Hugo isn’t actually a G-rated children’s fantasy, though it appears and behaves uncannily similar to one. Beneath the veneer of kids’ entertainment, Hugo is actually a heartfelt film about the importance of the preservation of early cinema and film culture.

Based on an illustrated novel written by Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the film is about a Parisian orphan named Hugo who lives behind the walls of the Montparnasse railway station and surreptitiously maintains all the building’s clocks while evading capture from the station inspector. The children’s fantasy formula continues when, early on in the film, Hugo is accused of stealing by the cantankerous old man who runs the toy store in Montparnasse station. Which all seems straightforward enough, if not slightly predictable. But Things become infinitely more interesting when it is revealed that the cranky toy shop owner is actually silent film pioneer Georges Méliès living in obscurity. Georges Méliès is the visionary filmmaker responsible for foundational advances in photography and early special effects and his body of work includes A Trip to the Moon (1902), which contains the most famous image of his career; the face of the moon wincing when a bullet-shaped shuttle crashes into its right eye.

In the hands of any other filmmaker, the unresolved issue of Hugo would simply be a talented orphan who has yet to find his place in the world. But in the hands of a hardcore film preservationist and movie historian like Martin Scorsese, the film’s larger injustice which cries out to be righted is that a founding father of the cinema such as Georges Méliès going unrecognized and uncelebrated. Though the moms and kiddies might tear up when Hugo is finally accepted by Papa Georges, the cinephiles in the audience will be touched by the final scene when Méliès is finally honoured by the Cinema Society of France. So complete is this love letter to silent era filmmakers, that Scorsese includes a stirring montage of powerful images of early cinema which should give goosebumps to any silent movie lover; from Méliès-influenced spectacles like The Thief of Bagdad and The Cabinet of Dr. Cagliari to the antics of great comedians like Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd. Demonstrating that he remains a master of the medium, Scorsese brilliantly takes key images from the early cinema shown throughout Hugo and reuses them to create visually stunning digital 3D effects. When Hugo dramatically hangs from the big hand of the Montparnasse’s clock tower to once again escape the station inspector (which is also the image used on the film’s poster), it visually recreates the situation of Harold Lloyd in the silent comedy Safety Last featured earlier in the film. Fans of the director should also watch out for Scorsese’s Hitchcockian cameo during one of the film’s flashback sequences. Hugo is a film so deeply steeped in the tradition of filmmaking that I suspect informed adults will appreciate Scorsese’s latest, with all its layers and references, even more than the youngsters it was supposedly intended for.