Things Only Adults Notice In Hugo

Martin Scorsese is legendary for his tough-minded, brutally violent, very un-kid-friendly gangster epics, from 1973's Mean Streets all the way up to 2019's The Irishman. And yet, one of his very best movies is about as far from that formula as you can get — a sumptuously beautiful historical fantasy for children that goes down as soothingly as a hot cup of cocoa. 

Based on the illustrated novel by Brian Selznick, Hugo tells a timeless story that could've come from its 1930s setting, if not earlier, of the titular orphan boy (Asa Butterfield) living in the clocks of a Paris train station, the Gare d'Orsay. He's obsessed with repairing a broken clockwork man, his last connection to his dead father, and his quest leads him to Georges (Ben Kingsley), a bitter old toy salesman, revealing the secrets of both their pasts.

It's not the kind of thing most viewers would expect from the legendary director, but Scorsese's trademark emotional depth and obsessive love for cinematic history is all over Hugo. As a result, there are plenty of secrets lurking behind the kid-pleasing fairytale narrative and its 3D spectacle for adults to explore. Let's take a look.

From the aftermath of World War I through the '30s, Paris attracted an impressive collection of incredible artists. And since then, these writers, painters, and poets have popped up occasionally in some prestigious films. For example, a few months before Hugo debuted, Midnight in Paris sent Owen Wilson back in time to hobnob with the likes of Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein.

Hugo is much more concerned with its own characters' adventures than the luminaries they share the city with, but if you look closely, you'll see some of them hanging around the margins. For example, a café in the Gare d'Orsay features live music by a thin young man with an even thinner mustache. That's supposed to be Django Reinhardt, a Belgian guitarist who discovered jazz right around the time Hugo takes place and popularized guitar as a jazz instrument.

When Hugo interrupts Reinhardt's performance trying to escape from the Station Inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), we see a brief reaction from two other Parisian celebrities. One of them, with his unmistakable curly mustache, is the great Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dalí. A founder of the postwar Surrealist movement and still its most famous artist, Dalí created hundreds of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and unclassifiable oddities over his half-century career. His tablemate is James Joyce, the Irish author of even more experimental works like Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake, who wrote in a stream-of-consciousness style full of new words and tangled webs of references.

We've described Hugo as a fantasy, but a whole lot of it happened in reality. There really was a filmmaker named George Méliès, and he really did go bankrupt and spend his twilight years working in a train station toy shop (even though it was in Montparnasse and not the more photogenic Gare d'Orsay) before his fans tracked him down. And all the clips we see from his films are real.

Hugo rightly describes Méliès as the first filmmaker to realize movies could be used to not just record reality but to create works of fantasy. This means that he's a staple of film education, and most people who've taken a class or even cracked open a book on the medium's history will be familiar with his work, especially the iconic image of a rocket landing in the Man in the Moon's eye from A Trip to the Moon. This scene has received homages in everything from Futurama to Smashing Pumpkins' classic video for "Tonight, Tonight." 

When Hugo recalls his father telling him about seeing the film, wheels may already be turning in attentive viewers' minds about Georges' identity. But it all really comes together when Hugo finally gets the automaton to work thanks to a key from Georges' goddaughter, Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz), and watches the machine draw that classic image from Méliès' film. Hugo's careful not to tip its hand too early, not revealing Georges' last name until that scene, but savvy viewers may be well ahead of it by that point.

After discovering Papa Georges' connection to the automaton, Hugo and Isabelle run down to the library to see what they can find about his mysterious past. The librarian recommends The Invention of Dreams by the (fictional) scholar René Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg). They find some of the answers they're looking for along with a wealth of knowledge about the magic of the early movies, represented in a montage so full of classic moments that film fans won't want to blink. 

Some highlights include one of the first films ever made, Employees Leaving the Lumière Factory, and other early experiments by the Lumiére brothers and Thomas Edison. Hugo and Isabelle read about the Lumiere film Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat and how the audience flinched when the train came at them, foreshadowing a later scene where the film inspires both Papa Georges to make his own movies and Hugo's nightmare where a train nearly runs him over.

The great silent comedians Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin appear in scenes from their own respective masterpieces, The General and The Kid. So does the Sleepwalker from the pioneering German horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the spectacular Babylon set from the multimillion-dollar epic Intolerance. Scorsese even includes some sneaky references to his own movies. An Edison film of a boxing match recalls Raging Bull, his biography of boxer Jake La Motta. 

In the film, Hugo has a series of surreal nightmares. In the first one, he finds the key to the automaton lying on the train tracks, and even though he sees it's safe to run down and grab it, a train suddenly comes speeding into the station. The engineers frantically try to stop the locomotive, crashing through the cement floor of the station and all the way through the outside walls. It's a shocking moment, even more so if you were lucky enough to see it in 3D. But that kind of thing only happens in dreams, right?

Well, it really did happen across town from Hugo's station in 1895, and the scene of the train hanging out the window is copied directly from a photo taken at the scene. At the Gare Montparnasse, the engineer of an express train from the village of Granville to Paris was running late and poured on the speed to make up for lost time. Whether he made it is a moot point, since the train was going so fast that he was either too distracted or unable to brake before the train hit the end of the tracks, and it continued speeding a hundred feet across the station and through the wall, killing one woman and injuring five passengers. The train stayed hanging there for four days, where Levy and Sons took the picture.

Hugo provides all the magic and adventure the little ones could want, but it also has some much heavier subjects on its mind, the kind that most kids hopefully don't have to deal with. 

Part of the reason so many people landed in Paris in the '30s is they were a so-called "Lost Generation" left adrift after World War I. That's certainly the case for the Station Inspector, who's so painfully self-conscious about his war injury and the noisy leg brace it requires him to wear that in two separate scenes, he bails out of his conversations with the flower seller when it starts squeaking. He's only able to overcome his discomfort when she connects with him over their shared loss, telling him her brother died in the war. Papa Georges never served, but the war scarred him in his own way, changing the world so completely that it no longer has any place for him.

Hugo wasn't even born until after the war had ended, but he still has his own traumas that connect him to the other characters. The loss of his home and family are literally connected to Georges' losses through the automaton, a remnant of Hugo's lost father and Georges' lost career. And while not as much is made of it, there's a suggestion that he shares some trauma with the Station Inspector, too, who tells him, "It's straight to the orphanage with you! You'll learn a thing or two there. I certainly did."