Word Crimes:THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7 and BEING THE RICARDOS

An Aaron Sorkin screenplay comes in one of two modes: too much, and way too much. I love the former, but the latter can clang and grate and scrape across my patience. He’s such a wordy, witty writer, capable of soaring rhetoric and juicy monologues. His ear for embedding characterization in the pithiest of comebacks and most garrulous walk-and-talks is a good match for his interest in high-wire halls-of-power and behind-the-scenes tensions. His characters are often people with inflated egos or self-important positions of influence. He must understand them so well because he’s one of them. When he’s on, he’s one of our best. The too-muchness of his writing makes a perfect match for material. His The Social Network, so sharply perceptive about Facebook’s founding conflicts, balanced with beautifully clinical David Fincher direction, remains one of the finest scripts in recent memory. But when he’s off—taking his tendencies to overwrite his subtext until it spills out as just plain text like in howlingly clunky tone-deaf attempts like media-matters dramas The Newsroom or Studio 60—it curdles fast. When you’re an artist who thrives when high on your own supply, it’s easy to get way too much out of each moment.

Take last year’s The Trial of the Chicago 7. It’s based on the real circus of a court case following protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention that were violently broken up by a bludgeoning police presence. A group of leading leftist activists were targeted by the newly elected Nixon administration to make an example of them. The judge ended up a loony attention seeker who made all kinds of questionable decisions—like ordering Bobby Seale, a leader in the Black Panthers, bound and gagged—while the defendants, many previously unknown to each other, often used the massive press interest in their plight as a soapbox on which to make important points about the state of the country. (They also used it as an excuse to poke prankish fun at the authorities who were in the process of overreaching.) Sorkin sees in this case good reason to comment on our present right-wing lunacies and various social movements protesting them. But he puts too much spin on the ball in each sequence. Characters are practically explaining this connection to us as monologues and jostling debates are carried out with musty pseudo-historical perspective.

Not helping matters, the flat staging from Sorkin as director tends to undercut the few good moments he’s written.With Trial he somehow can’t pull off the courtroom sparring he crafted so well as screenwriter for A Few Good Men's "you can't handle the truth," or the Social Network depositions. Here it’s self-consciously, and badly, theatrical, with a host of fine actors in full showy character mode (Sacha Baron Cohen, Jeremy Strong, Eddie Redmayne, Michael Keaton, Frank Langella, John Carroll Lynch, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) chewing over flashy phrasing as the camera pushes plainly and shafts of light falls simply and dramatically. One wonders what a better visual sense would’ve shaped out of these lumpy scenes. But then I recall how Sorkin’s shaping of the pages pushes the real events toward big fake movie climaxes that are somehow flatter and less surprising than the actual events. Just when he builds up a head of self-righteous steam and winds up a character to let them go, it rings the falsest. The best scenes are the smallest, and the simplest, where an old pro like Keaton can underplay the overwritten and end up, on balance, just fine. Strangely, for a writer prized for his verbal pyrotechnics, the court sequences are somehow less outrageous and dramatic and hilarious and suspenseful than the actual court transcripts. Those have been used as the basis for a fine animated documentary from a dozen years back—Brett Morgen’s Chicago 10—and are available for free online. Those are the better way to experience the trial.

With that in mind, one might think the new Sorkin picture, a behind-the-scenes of I Love Lucy in a moment of high-stakes drama, would pale in comparison to simply watching the still-brilliant original episodes of the classic sitcom. Of course it does. But that’s where I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong that it wouldn’t be fun enough on its own terms. I was quite taken with Being the Ricardos for playing up the ways in which it stacks up historical conflicts into one stuffed week. Lucille Ball is accused of being a communist (which she was, once) at the heights of the Red Scare. Desi Arnaz is tagged as a philanderer (which he was) at one of many periods of peak tabloid power. And, if the sponsors or the network don’t pull the plug for either or both of those scandals, the power couple behind the program are determined to use Lucy’s real life pregnancy for her character, too. (One suit bristles at the idea that it’ll make viewers think about…you know…how that happened. They sleep in twin beds, he reminds.) That Sorkin’s invention places these tricky moments all in the same short period of time—the structure is all showbiz hustle, as the movie starts with a table read and ends with a taping—gives the movie a pressure cooker of competing interests. His script weaves in and out of the various conflicts and keeps the ensemble a plate-spinning act of worries and wants. It successfully cross-breeds the let’s-put-on-a-show zippiness with an earnest grappling with the people behind-the-scenes and What It All Meant.

Sorkin’s brand of pushy cleverness fits a great cast of actors playing performers and other creative types. Here Nicole Kidman becomes a Lucy who’s ambitious, steely, hugely talented, and knows what she wants. She is clearly in charge of the show, and really won’t back down from insisting being a Communist used to be considered a valid option for supporting the workers of the country. Javier Bardem plays Desi as a chipper man constantly tending to his ego, but with real love for Lucy. (He also doesn’t suffer fools, such as one well-meaning producer who tries to convince him he’s the “I” who “Loves Lucy” and therefore the top-billed title character.) His Cuban roots make him a bit more uncomfortable with her politics. (There Sorkin tries a smidge too much for phony both-sides balance.) The main couple is, as on the show, surrounded by a sharp-tongued supporting cast. Nina Arianda’s Ethel and J.K. Simmons’ Fred are great inhabitations with sly side-eyed commentary on, challenges to, and support for the main pair. And the show’s crew features Tony Hale, Alia Shawkat, Jake Lacy, Clark Gregg and more hustle through the stages, wardrobe department, and writing rooms. It’s a fine feat that mixes the sort of clever darting dialogue and blunt force messaging that a great cast can sell if Sorkin serves it up well.

There’s a kind of gleaming soft-focus romanticism to its approach, a weren’t-the-olden-days-grand? gloss to the sometimes-reductive smushing of so much social upheaval and conflict into one heavy week. (It spackles it over, somewhat, by having fake documentary talking heads from actors playing older versions of the writers’ room act as a Greek chorus of sorts.) And the writing sometimes tries too hard to make the ideas fit our modern context. Would Lucy really have accused someone of “Gaslighting” her? Nonetheless, it’s has the kind of fizz and pop that’s pleasing to the ear and flies by in a flash. Sorkin’s direction stays out of his writing’s way, and has a fine eye for the difference between on- and off-stage antics. I found it a satisfying and entertaining look at making a show in a time with an actual blacklist bouncing entertainers out of the business for their politics, when sexual mores were tamped down and repressed and not to be discussed, and when women and people of color weren’t to be treated as equals on or behind the screens. And yet, through making one of the greatest television comedies (who doesn’t know the chocolate factory sequence?), here’s a couple that manages to push on the edges of those societal constraints at a time when it could’ve resulted in a show going off the air. Now that’s cancel culture.

American Idiot: BORAT SUBSEQUENT MOVIEFILM

The vulgar genius of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat, the backwards foreign journalist hailing from a broad stereotype of a third-world country, who first appeared in the early-aughts comedy interview series Da Ali G Show before starring in his own hit film in 2006, is in getting people to expose their subterranean ugliness. His first film found him meandering America, skewering our country’s hypocrites’ morals and mores by revealing all sorts of prejudices. He surgically targeted the obtuse and the unsuspecting, who time and again revealed supreme patience, albeit in their patronizing attitudes toward other countries by, say, believing that a Kazakh would drink water out of a toilet. Still others were all-too eager to nod along with his endless stream of misogyny, anti-Semitism, and eagerly dance as he giddily fiddled with their own xenophobic assumptions confirmed. All that, a deep commitment to a cracked improv character, and an instant-classic comedy catchphrase machine, too? (You can still faintly hear the “My wiiife”s and “high-fiiive”s echoing across the culture.) How lucky we were to have a movie, however uneven, that brought this concoction to us, with elaborate dirty Candid Camera scenarios that escalated to the wildest gags and can-hardly-believe-what-I’m-seeing-or-hearing moments of high-wire tension and explosive laughter. That he did it again, with the less iconic, but no less outrageous Bruno, a flamboyant razor’s-edge confrontation with homophobia, is a feat of gonzo comedy chops. I’m glad he’s out there doing his thing.

Alas, the problem with Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is that Americans don’t have much ugliness hidden anymore. It’s all out in the open. A joke of this surprise sequel is that, no matter how extreme Borat goes, some individual is ready to happily accept him into the fold. Why, even walking into CPAC in a Klan hood gets him a few puzzled looks, but hardly an uproar. We live in a time where stupid political stunts — the faker the better — are the right wing currency, and a social media environment where a lie is a good as the truth and the optics, no matter how strained, are trotted out like actual substance. Truly, the political discourse is as debased as it has ever been. How is Borat to compete? This time around, he’s in disguise as an American most of the time, in a transparently fake fat suit and sloppily pasted jowls and facial hair. He says it’s because he’s too well known, an amusing meta commentary on the dozen years of speculation on how he could possibly follow-up his previous film’s unexpected jolts. His shtick is still funny, but more scattershot, and gains welcome novelty from inventing a new character. This time he’s brought his daughter along. She’s an exuberant match—game actress Maria Bakalova sloshing around a similarly phony accent, and eager to match her father in extreme prejudice, gross-out gags, and preposterous miscommunications. They make quite a pair.

Though the movie as a whole —sloppily photographed and slapped together for an authentic guerrilla style—hangs together less than one would hope, there are a handful of big, cringing laughs to be found here. There’s a squirming sequence in a Crisis Pregnancy Center in which a straight-faced evangelical pastor studiously avoids obvious implications of incest in order to affirm “God’s plan.” (Of course he doesn’t know the “baby inside her” is a tiny plastic cupcake topper.) There’s a debutante ball in which the old men slobber along with Borat’s objectification of the daughters. There’s a dress shop where the owner doubles-over in overly-accommodating laughter when Borat asks for the “no means yes” section. And it culminates in a much-buzzed about sequence in which the daughter gets an interview with Rudy Guliiani that ends in him asking for her phone number as he lays back on a hotel bed with his hand down his pants. For every riotously hilarious stunt, there’s a lot of downtime and setup, or a misfiring disgusting detail. (The joke of a crowd staring in horror at a dress drenched in menstrual blood was beyond me.) And it’s never exactly clear what the film thinks it’s exposing. That a right-wing protest will cheer a racist song about wanting Obama locked up and injected with the flu? Of course they would. So the movie doesn’t have the shock value, or the novelty. But it does have the perversely appealing Borat, whose elaborate burlesque of Otherness and rampant resistance of progressive values finds some strange sweetness at times. He comes by his ignorance honestly, and actually does want to learn and improve himself, however circuitous and perhaps futile the route. It makes the resolutely ignorant of our country look all the worse in comparison. Its final joke is on them.

Squeak and Gibber: ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

Alice Through the Looking Glass, the sequel to 2010’s live-action Alice in Wonderland, tasks director James Bobin (of Flight of the Conchords and the two most recent Muppets movies) with turning out imitation Tim Burton. It’s quite a task considering its predecessor was already Burton himself doing imitation Burton. (It’s easily his worst film, a few appealing grace notes in an ornately garish and dispassionate self-parody.) That Looking Glass manages to be a good movie in spots is a nice surprise. For maybe fifteen minutes total I thought Bobin and screenwriter Linda Woolverton were on to something, finding Alice (Mia Wasikowska, never an unwelcome sight) a ships’ captain in 1875, eager to go exploring. The only problem is these real-world scenes are bookends for a whole lot of consequence-free nonsense in Wonderland taking up the bulk of the movie. Not only does every bit of the story get undone by the end, but it even rolls back some of the last one, too.

Following the template of its predecessor, this new movie follows Alice through token scenes of struggles with her real problems – this time patriarchal business snobs, revealed in a quiet funny cut to wrinkled, bearded white grumps, who can’t even begin to imagine a woman explorer – then spirits her away to Wonderland for a fantastical topsy-turvy fantasy story. There are some clever bits here and there, like a Humpty Dumpty egg rolling off a gigantic chessboard, a doorway opening onto a great height, and, nestled in a chained up grandfather clock, an enormous castle containing time’s master clock. The weirdly unpopulated realm is, however, awfully low on characters who become more than set dressing. It’s also low on conflict. The best the contractually obligated returning creatures – like Tweedledee and Tweedledumb (Matt Lucas’s face floating on enormous CGI heads), the White Queen (Anne Hathaway), and the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry) – can come up with is concern about the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp, creepy mannered gibbering passing as creativity) who has been acting strange lately. How can they tell?

It turns out the Hatter is upset by memories of his family, who were killed by the Jabberwocky controlled by the vengeful Queen of Hearts (Helena Bonham Carter). Alice is encouraged to go back in time and save the Hatter’s family. To do so, she meets Time (Sacha Baron Cohen chewing over a deliriously silly accent), a clockwork stickler for the rules of time and space. She outwits him quickly, hopping in a spinning gewgaw that allows her to sail the timeline back into the past. This initial flying spasm of effects leads to the movie’s cleverest moment as Time zips after her shouting, “You can’t win a race against time! I’m inevitable!” Later we learn he waits for no man. Also the Cheshire Cat at one point sprawls out on his shoulders and declares that he’s “on time.” You take your small delights where you can get them in a movie that has a lot of movement and noise, but short supply of actual wit or compelling curiosity. Bobin tries his best to provide vibrant colorful images, but the more they pile up the less they add up.

The stifling artificiality of the gaudy colorful sets and costumes has none of the imagination to power actual whimsy, and the plot itself is motored by the flimsiest of motivations. Who cares if Alice can take the Mad out of the Hatter? Not me. It’s not an enjoyable story to be lost in when its very mechanics operate against investment. Its best moments occur when Alice steps back into reality, her adventures in Wonderland having no bearing on the real world and never carrying enough emotional weight to represent metaphoric developments. The movie drains the beautifully logical illogic of its Lewis Carroll source through the blandness of conventional fantasy tropes, and looks all the worse for it. And the whole thing, burdened with an achingly predictable MacGuffin-based plot, is not nearly as delightful as it should be to excuse so much swirling around hither and yon across flat backdrops and Toontown sets dusted with hallucinogenic cartoon filigree. It’s just pointless, plodding gobbledygook. Nothing sticks in the brain. Nothing is worth digesting. Imagine being slowly buried alive in a bottomless vat of cotton candy.

Hear the People Sing: LES MISÉRABLES

It took long enough to get Les Misérables on the big screen, at least when you’re talking about Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil’s beloved long-running (nearly 30 years) stage musical based on the hefty Victor Hugo novel. I’ll leave the comparisons of stage to screen to those who have actually encountered this production before, but as one whose first exposure to the musical comes through this film, I must say that, despite some reservations I’ll definitely mention, the film works. I can see why so many have such strong feelings about the source material. This is a sturdy, often stirring Hollywood musical of the kind that won’t win over any reluctant naysayers or those unlikely to either accept or ignore director Tom Hooper’s tendency to shoot everything in wide angle close-ups, but is sure to satisfy some of us who roll our eyes whenever Carol Reed’s altogether delightfully square literary musical Oliver! turns up in lists of Oscar “mistakes.”

If nothing else, Tom Hooper (who rode his last film, the even squarer The King’s Speech, to Oscar glory) has adapted Les Misérables in a way that’s determinedly earnest. It’s the kind of movie where characters are constantly having their lives turned upside down by momentous emotion and revelations happen in the blink of an eye. One glance and you’re the most in love you’ve ever been with a girl you just met. Receive one kind gesture and a criminal is instantly a better man, or an authority figure is instantly conflicted about his duty. Hooper underplays some of this quite nicely, but that will bury motivations from time to time. (There are a few character moments that left me lost.) Had the film been under the direction of a flashier, more competent visual stylist, there might have been an embrace of some of the more swoony elements in a way that could have led to greater clarity. Still, Hooper has been handed strong material and he’s smart enough not to mess it up.

The story, set in the mid-1800s, starts with Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman), a prisoner who skips out on parole and, with inspiration from a kind priest, decides to start a new life as an honorable man. Too bad, then, that after several years of successful remaking, the policeman long in pursuit, Javert (Russell Crowe), eventually catches up.  This story crosses paths with Fantine (Anne Hathaway), who is tragically unemployed and sickly, barely able to provide the money she needs to send to her very young daughter Cosette (Isabelle Allen), who has been left at a boarding house run by a couple of careless cons (Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen). Valjean promises Fantine that he’ll find the girl and make sure she’s taken care of. He does, but one step ahead of Javert, he and the girl flee. He starts over yet again. 

The plot picks up years later in Paris, where the frustrated public, among them idealistic students Marius and Éponine (Eddie Redmayne and Samantha Barks), plan a revolution. All of the other characters are in the general vicinity of the conflict as well, leading to Marius glimpsing Cosette (now grown into Amanda Seyfried) and deciding that he’s in love. Good thing she decides in the same instant that she loves him too, no matter how protective her adopted father is. And we haven’t even gotten to the revolution yet! This is a tragedy and a romance with an epic historical sweep that finds along the way menace and kindness, humor and heartbreak, romance and retribution. There’s lots of plot packed into a quick (relatively speaking, I suppose) two-and-a-half hours, leading to some moments where I was intellectually moved by the proceedings without getting my heart involved. There’s just no downtime here as we hurry from peak to peak and I felt a bit of a burden to fill in the gaps myself. And yet, this is sometimes powerful, always hardworking storytelling that soars on the back of memorable sung-through melodies and motifs.

Rarely stopping to catch a breath, the characters sing their hearts out. Hooper has one or two good ideas on how to capture the performances. First, there’s the live singing. Unlike most movie musicals, which record the vocal performances separately, leaving the actors room to maneuver through the scenes and dances without worrying about hitting all the right notes while filming, Hooper captured the singing right then and there on set. This results in many stirring moments of musical cinema in which characters are raw and emotive in ways that sound spontaneous. You can hear characters straining at times, warbling away from big notes when a swell of emotion chokes them up, weeping through swallowed notes or swelling with prideful energy. The singing is undoubtedly rough around the edges at times, but the cast does a fine job nonetheless. I was surprised how moved I was by Jackman’s clipped, half-swallowed bubbling in his most dramatic moments.

Hooper’s second good idea helps the cast’s singing as well. When the constantly swirling melodies part to let a character step forward and sing a solo soliloquy, his restless camera stops to capture the song in steady shots that keep the performance in close frames that regard the emotion that plays out with the notes. These moments could have failed a weaker cast, but here they are simple and effective. When Banks sings of unrequited love in “On My Own,” when Redmayne mourns in “Empty Chairs At Empty Tables,” and when Jackman sings his epiphany in “Valjean’s Soliloquy,” the effect is a rather lovely work of cinematic theatricality, putting us not just front row, but on the stage for a terrific feat of musical acting. The clear standout sequence of this kind is Hathaway’s astonishing performance of what has to be the musical’s most well known number, the heartbreaking “I Dreamed a Dream.” It plays out in more or less one shot, each note a twist of the knife in this character’s sad trajectory.

Though the film feels so big with production design that feels like heightened grubby realism and soaring music that helps fill the frames with operatic emotions, Hooper’s closeness occasionally makes the whole thing feel small and cramped. (You wouldn’t really want to sit on the stage to watch the show now, would you?) He’s not a particularly visual director and when he’s called upon to manage a small group number – “At the End of the Day,” say, or especially with “Master of the House” – the shots don’t add up. When it comes to matching rousing unison and harmonies with nimble visual compositions to match, he’s not up to the task. Here he breaks with his old-fashioned material and old-fashioned approach for the sake of a misguided method of keeping editing choppy and shots close and ill framed. There’s a sense that he’s trying to stay away from precisely the bigness and exaggeration that makes the best movie musicals work so well. It doesn’t work for the material here, but it’s something that one can learn to overlook if determined to ride the emotion underlying it all.

After all, there’s a great story here, or at least so I gather. Some of the rushed storytelling left me scratching my head and the pacing in the final half hour or so goes strangely slack, but the broad strokes of pain, romance, and tragic revolution resonate well. The performers sell each and every big moment, a great cast, singing memorable, endlessly hummable tunes. Less a great movie, more a movie in which you can find greatness, Les Misérables is never better than when its director can get out of his own way. 

Coming to America: THE DICTATOR

In The Dictator, co-writer and star Sacha Baron Cohen gives himself a massive satirical target. How easy is it to make fun of the excesses and egregious views of a megalomaniacal tyrant? His dictator character is General Aladeen, the oppressive ruler of the fictional country of Wadiya. He’s presented as a wealthy, fatuous, violent, misogynistic racist. But, you know, the funny kind. The funniest thing about the movie is how it manages to slip around the target and just about miss it completely simply through the nature of the way the movie is structured. For this conceit to work, Cohen needs to have us either rooting for the downfall of Aladeen or hoping he learns the error of his ways. That’s not exactly what Cohen, collaborating for the third time with director Larry Charles, has in mind here. They want to use the fictional horrible dictator to critique our own society. And they get there, eventually, for one pretty good scene, but they sacrifice the potential for a more successful comedy in the process.

The plot of the movie concerns the dictator’s trip to America to address the United Nations. Once there, right-hand-man Tamir (Ben Kingsley) hires a racist private security guard (John C. Reilly, whose small role is presented almost in full in the trailer) to take the dictator out. Once out of the way, he can be replaced with a stupid lookalike (also Cohen) who will sign an agreement to democratize Wadiya and hand over its oilfields to multinational oil corporations. That’s a funny premise, but instead of running with that, following the innocent doppelganger (a la Chaplin’s great, gutsy 1940 send-up The Great Dictator) and the shadowy backroom deals Kingsley makes with American companies – he essentially sells the country away from one uncaring overlord to another – the film thinks it’s far funnier to follow General Aladeen. He escapes assassination, but ends up beardless and thus (apparently) unrecognizable on the streets of New York.

Cohen gives the character a lot of corrosive satiric energy, but he’s used in a series of broad jokes and sequences that crisscross the line between merely tasteless and out-and-out offensive with staggering frequency. Aladeen is constantly making awful comments about women and minorities, casually referencing rape (not funny at all) and terrorism (sometimes funny), and generally behaving entitled and rude to everyone he meets. This can be a good source of humor. Indeed it is in a very funny scene on a helicopter tour in which he’s talking in the Wadiyan language about his new 2012 model Porsche 911 and scares a couple of tourists. But the entire thrust of the plot is to see him back in power. It’s built into the very core of it all; that’s his entire goal in the film. He schemes with an expatriate Wadiyan nuclear scientist (Jason Mantzoukas) to interrupt Ben Kingsley’s scheme and return his homeland to its proper oppression under his rule.

Aladeen doesn’t learn any lessons along the way, unless you count the love, or something like it, he grows to feel for the earnest fair-trade grocer played by a strangely muted Anna Faris in an unconvincing and distracting subplot. He remains an unrepentantly nasty guy, up to his old tricks of intimidation and casual cruelty, which would be fine if the film weren’t intent on softening him (like with that pesky would-be romance) and losing focus with bizarre digressions of the kind you’d think a savage 83-minute satire wouldn’t need. One surreal gag starts with a grocery-shopper giving birth in the store when the owner asks Aladeen to help. He tries to text his Wadiyan co-conspirator during the birthing and ends up with his cell phone up inside the poor woman. This is just mind-bogglingly unfunny and way off topic. It’s this and moments like this that causes the movie to go minutes on end without a single laugh in sight. And when a movie is so short, these laughless stretches really add up quickly.

It’s just that Aladeen is hard to care about, unlike the endearing qualities that balance out the tone in his previous starring roles. In Cohen’s early film efforts in gonzo comedies Borat and Bruno (also directed by Larry Charles) he fearlessly inhabited deliberately irritating characters from his Ali G HBO series, one a brusque, exaggeratedly prejudiced reporter from Kazakhstan and the other a clueless, vain, gay, Austrian, would-be celebrity fashionista. In each case, he set out across America, causing immediate culture-clash friction by sending out these outlandish characters to interact with real people. Those films contain healthy doses of potent cultural satire, and have plenty of moments that just feel miscalculated, but on some fundamental level, seeing people react so oddly or so blatantly discriminatory towards these characters puts us on their side. The Dictator is almost entirely miscalculation. I just couldn’t care about Aladeen getting his throne back, even at a grating satiric level, and if the film’s plotting is to work, it hinges to some extent on just such investment on the audience’s part. (What about that poor lookalike? He’s pretty funny, but glimpsed in only two or three scenes.)

Where the film’s satire really lands is in a climactic speech in which General Aladeen extols the virtues of a dictatorship. He says that under that form of government all wealth can be concentrated in the top 1%, you can give your buddies tax breaks, the media can appear free but really be controlled by a few powerful men and their families, you can fill your jails with predominantly one race and no one even cares, and etcetera. It’s a powerful left-hook of a political statement, very strong, very funny, and very cynical. But it’s a sharpness that comes too little too late in a movie that has spent a considerable portion of its run time messing around with gross-out gags and purposefully offensive material that just doesn’t add up. It keeps all its most interesting material on the sidelines where it’s least useful to making this an enjoyable experience. It’s a blown opportunity, a satire that aims for such a big target it’s not just disappointing, it’s downright depressing that Cohen largely missed.

Movie Magic: HUGO

Orson Welles reportedly called filmmaking “the biggest electric train set a boy ever had!” This line seems apt for Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, a film which is built around a gorgeous recreation of 1930’s Paris, in particular a massive train station in which most of the film takes place. It builds a convincing world with several employees getting charming through-lines like a café owner (Frances de la Tour), a newsstand owner (Richard Griffiths), a florist (Emily Mortimer), and a security guard (Sacha Baron Cohen). The virtuosic opening starts high above Paris and in one fluid shot dips down into the train station, slides through the entire building, and comes to rest at a giant clock face, behind which we see a pair of eyes. This is Hugo (Asa Butterfield), a young boy who is the center of the film’s story. He sees all of these characters in the station as he scampers through the walls, winding the clocks and stealing just enough to survive. His uncle (Ray Winstone) had the job before him, but now his uncle has disappeared. As long as the clocks continue to run, no one will suspect that there’s an orphan in the walls.

His father (Jude Law) was a clockmaker and a repairman, with a house full of gears and switches, the air filled with soft, perpetual ticking. One night he brought home a silver, metallic wind-up doll, a rusty, neglected automaton that was full of promise and mystery. Hugo was helping him fix it when his uncle suddenly appeared informing him that his father was killed in a fire at the museum where he found some extra work. This is how Hugo came to be in the train station and why he is drawn to the shop run by a toymaker (Ben Kingsley) who stocks it with magic tricks and wind-up figures. When the timing is right, Hugo sneaks mechanical pieces and toys back to his hideaway where he uses them to continue to work on the broken automaton his father left behind.

The toymaker catches Hugo and confiscates the contents of his pockets, which includes a notebook in which his father had sketched plans for the mechanical man’s fixing. Distraught, Hugo follows the toymaker through the wintry streets of Paris but is so helpless and filled with conflicting emotions that he can’t figure out what to do next. Outside the toymaker’s house, he meets the man’s goddaughter, Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz), who promises to help him. Together they try to find a way to fix the automaton, but along the way they realize that another, perhaps more important, thing that needs repair is the toymaker himself. Papa Georges, as Isabelle calls him, is a man who was an early filmmaking innovator who fell on hard times and pushed his passion away out of necessity. He’s lost access to his passion and lost his films to the cruelties of his situation. It’s as if a part of him is now missing.

This is a film of marvelously fluid tone, contemplative and emotionally involving while shot through with terrific humor and quietly earned thrills. The kids are on a quest to fix the mechanical man and get involved along the way in a journey filled with learning. An elderly librarian (Christopher Lee) and a learned film historian (Michael Stuhlbarg) are happy to help them. There’s a love of facts and knowledge here that is thrilling. There’s also a very real sense of a childhood friendship developing that’s balanced quite nicely with the deep vein of sorrow and grief that runs through the film, of death and destruction, of lives shattered by war and by accidents, of people who need to continue to move forward, to do what they feel called to do, despite all their personal setbacks.

And in all this weighty material there lies a more conventional kid-friendly plot with Hugo scrambling to hide from the lanky guard who will surely send him to the orphanage. This is played for broad comedy at times (Baron Cohen is very good at it, after all), but it’s laced with such a spiky threat to Hugo that it feels funny and adventurous without pandering to the children in the audience or cheapening the film’s so very moving themes. In fact, this guard, as comedic as he is, is also a character wounded by his past, an orphan himself, and a limping veteran of the Great War as well. There’s no such thing as a simple character here. They all serve a purpose.

Masterful filmmaking is in evidence here, inventive and visually striking in ways that support the enthralling magic of the film. Scorsese is playing with all kinds of technological tricks new and old, from wonderfully expressive, layered and dynamic 3D angles (this is a rare film for which a 3D screening would be essential) to sweeping, fluid tracking shots. The plot, when you get right down to it, is rather simple and certainly was of no surface need to last over two hours. But any shorter and Scorsese wouldn’t have had time to explore such wonderful emotion, to show us all he wanted to show, his gorgeous, fully realized world with cinematography from Robert Richardson and production design from Dante Ferretti. This is a beautiful film to regard with a color palate of icy blue and rich gold. It’s easy to get enfolded into the film’s warmth and power. Much like Brian Selznick’s incredible book, on which the film is based, didn’t need all those pages of beautifully sketched illustrations, but would certainly be less distinctive and less artful without them, Scorsese creates a fully realized cinematic environment that doesn’t slip away easily.

There’s a bit of Scorsese in the characters, the curious boy, the bookish girl, the bearded scholar, and the clever toymaker. In them is the a man who loves finding what makes things tick, who loves stories, who loves learning, and who loves to entertain. This feels like an intensely personal film, a lovely interior adventure, a small-scale epic of character and emotion that is also a moving tribute to the importance of film history and film preservation, a cause near to Scorsese’s heart. One of the most spellbinding moments of the film – of the year, even – is a sequence that dives deeper into the past and gives us an enchanting montage that offers a look at the career of film pioneer Georges Méliès. In another delightful moment, the kids sit in the library and read to each other from an early history of cinema and the pages come alive. Here is a film with an absorbing narrative that also effectively communicates the deep core reasons for why I love film. When Hugo tells Isabelle his fond memories of going to the movies with his father, the words he spoke resonated not just with his story but also with my own. It was a nearly overwhelming moment. For all of Scorsese’s work teaching the importance of preserving and appreciating the cultural heritage of cinema, this might be his most important and vital teaching tool yet.

I saw the film in a theater that had several young kids in the audience. They were having a great time and left the theater saying to each other “What a great movie!” Maybe, just maybe, one of them will be inspired to learn more about the movies. (Perhaps the best Christmas present for a child who loves Hugo would be a kid-friendly book about film and a box set of early cinema, especially the comedies). Scorsese isn’t content to say that movies are magical and then simply show us familiar clips of great silent films (no matter how surprising and joyful the appearance of Harold Lloyd, Douglas Fairbanks, Buster Keaton, and more on the screen of a modern multiplex was to this cinephile). Instead, Scorsese goes ahead and makes a magical film about movie magic, proving his point in practice.