Synopsis

Hugo (2011)

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In 1931, 12-year-old Hugo Cabret lives in Paris with his father, a widowed, but kind and devoted master clockmaker. Hugo’s father takes him to see films and loves those of Georges Méliès best of all.

When Hugo’s father dies in a museum fire, Hugo is taken away by his alcoholic uncle Claude, who maintains the clocks in the railway station of Gare Montparnasse. Claude teaches him how to tend to the clocks, then disappears. Hugo lives a secretive life in the station’s hidden chambers and passageways, maintaining the clocks, avoiding the vindictive Station Inspector Gustave and his doberman Maximilion, and working on his father’s most ambitious project: repairing a broken automaton—a mechanical man designed to write with a pen. Hugo begins stealing the parts he needs for the automaton, but a toy-store owner catches him and confiscates his carefully drawn blueprints.

The automaton is missing a critical part: a heart-shaped key. Convinced the machine contains a message from his father, Hugo goes to desperate lengths to fix it. He gains the assistance of Isabelle, the toy shop owner’s goddaughter. He introduces her to the movies, which her godfather has never let her see. Remarkably, Isabelle turns out to have the automaton’s key. When they use it to activate the automaton, it produces a drawing of a film scene Hugo remembers his father telling him about. They discover the film was created by Isabelle’s godfather, Georges Méliès—a cinema legend, now neglected and disillusioned—and that the automaton was his beloved creation from his days as a magician. Searching the Méliès household for clues, they find a cache of the filmmaker’s fantastic drawings. However, Méliès catches them in the act, admonishes Isabelle, and banishes Hugo from their home.

Hugo and Isabelle travel to Paris’ great Film Academy Library, where they find a book with photos and biographical information about Méliès. They meet René Tabard, a film expert who venerates Méliès, and who, like most of the film world, assumes Méliès is dead, as he was never seen after World War I brought an abrupt halt to his career. René shows Hugo and Isabelle the collection of rare Méliès memorabilia in his Library office. When he learns Méliès is alive and living in Paris, he is incredulous, then excited at the possibility of meeting the great man.

Hugo and Isabelle invite René to the Méliès home, where they encounter Méliès’s wife, Jeanne, whom René immediately recognizes as the star of many of Méliès films. René, who has brought a small projector, shows the group his copy of Méliès’s surviving film, A Trip to the Moon. When Méliès finds the four in his parlour, he is outraged, but Jeanne convinces him to cherish his glorious accomplishments rather than regretting his lost dream. He recounts his history as a film-maker and his bankruptcy during The Great War (World War I), finishing with the sad tale of donating his beloved automaton to a museum where it was ignored and destroyed in a fire.

Realizing that his automaton is Méliès’s creation, Hugo races back to the train station to retrieve it. However, he is spotted by Inspector Gustave, who chases Hugo through the station. As he approaches one of the train platforms, Hugo stumbles and the machine flies from his grasp, landing on the tracks. As he struggles to retrieve it, a train approaches, and the Inspector rescues Hugo a split second before the train would have crushed him. Before the Inspector is able to take Hugo to the orphanage, Méliès arrives and claims Hugo as his child, and the Inspector lets him go.

In the final scene, Méliès—accompanied by his wife, his goddaughter, and Hugo—is the honoured guest at a grand celebration, where his invaluable contributions to cinema are acknowledged and praised.