Hugo

Martin Scorsese has made a film with a U certificate, and the surprise lasts about as long as the opening shot. Robert Richardson’s camera drops out of the sky over Paris in the 1930s, plunges through the concourse of a great railway station and climbs into the face of a clock, where a boy is watching through the numeral four. Hugo, written by John Logan, is Scorsese doing what he has always done, which is love films out loud. It is warm and beautifully made, and about thirty of its 126 minutes are spent explaining what the rest has already shown us.

Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) lives in the walls of the station, winding the clocks his drunk Uncle Claude (Ray Winstone) has abandoned, and stealing what he needs. Mostly that is small brass parts, because his late father (Jude Law) left him a broken automaton and a notebook of drawings for mending it. The parts come from a toy booth kept by a sour old man (Ben Kingsley) who catches him, takes the notebook and threatens to burn it. Butterfield plays Hugo as a watcher, pale and careful, and the camera likes his face more than the script does. Silent, he is good; asked to say what he feels, he says it like a line.

Kingsley is the reason to watch. His past is given away at the halfway point, so we will leave it there; Kingsley plays him as someone who has decided to be bitter and is finding it hard work. There is a moment early on, in the booth, when he looks at the boy’s notebook and his hands stop, and we felt the whole film turn on it before a word was said. Chloë Grace Moretz, as his goddaughter Isabelle, has been given a bookish girl who says “clandestine” and means it as friendship. It is a written idea of a child, and she carries it with more grace than it deserves.

Dante Ferretti has built the station as a small city, with cafés and a flower stall on the concourse, and behind the walls a second city of gears, ladders and steam. Sandy Powell dresses the crowds in browns and dusty blues. The 3D is used for depth rather than for things flying at us: snow falling between us and the glass, a corridor of cogs receding into the dark. Howard Shore’s score is accordion and waltz and it does not stop, which suits the first hour and wears by the second.

Sacha Baron Cohen’s Station Inspector, with his leg brace, his Doberman and his temper, is meant to be the film’s comic engine, and he is funny about one time in three. The chases through the concourse, which Thelma Schoonmaker cuts fast and clean, are the film’s idea of what children want, and there are too many of them. His shy courtship of the flower seller Lisette (Emily Mortimer) is sweeter than anything in the chases, and gets a fraction of the time.

The second half is where Scorsese’s own passion takes over. There is a sequence recreating an early film studio, a glass house full of painted sets, mermaids, moon-men and a man in a lobster suit, and it moved us more than we expected, because here is a director showing us the thing he loves being made by hand. Then Logan’s script has Michael Stuhlbarg’s René Tabard, a film historian, sit the children down and explain what they and we have just felt. A film about how pictures can speak without words does not, in the end, trust its own pictures.

Against Scorsese’s own record this sits nearest The Age of Innocence (1993): a period picture that cares about objects and light and is in no hurry. Children under eight will fidget through the middle stretch; adults who love old films will forgive it almost everything. Watch it with a child who asks questions, and be ready for the film to answer most of them before the child can. It carries a U.