Hugo Cabret: Forgetting names, remembering legacies

The legacy you offer to the world is not measured by how people remember it, but by how it has changed others; how it has changed the world for the better.

First glimpse of how the camera zoomed its way through the white smoke of the train station, I remembered Platform 9 3/4. It also reminded me of Ratatouille with that unmistakable and classical instrumental music at the beginning of the movie that immediately took us to Paris. Most of all, it reminded me of my childhood passion for adventures, only this time I made my way through the magical lair of a 12-year-old orphan behind the walls of Gare du Nord station with a perfect view of the lovely Eiffel Tower.

Truly Academy Award winning, Hugo Cabret (2011, directed by Michael Scorsese) is the movie that has offered more than our childhood adventures and the beauty of Paris; it also showered the audience--both young and old--with life's important lessons on perseverance, on realizing our purpose in life and on having faith in our dreams and achievements even though people have long forgotten them. The package also came with the story on the birth of the art of film that made me appreciate movies all the more.

Based on the children's novel entitled "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" by Brian Selznick, the story starts with orphan boy and clockmaker Hugo (Asa Butterfield, The Boy in Striped Pyjamas) living behind the walls of a train station alone and stealing food for survival after his father, also a clockmaker (Jude Law) died in a fire at the museum where he worked and his Uncle Claude left him to watch the clocks at the train station.

A mysterious automaton was the only memory he had left of his father and was determined to fix it thinking it would a message from his old man. With the help of a friend, Isabelle (Chloe Grace Montez, Diary of a Wimpy Kid series) who's crazy about adventures and had longed to experience one "at least outside of books", Hugo fixed the automaton and accidentally entered a "story of sadness" mysteriously webbed with the memories of his father, a movie of a moon hit by a rocket, magic tricks and even the automaton itself. As they discovered it was the story of the old toy maker Georges Melies (Ben Kingsley), a "broken" but legendary filmmaker and magician who was long forgotten by the world, their adventure became a quest to "fix" the old man that would also change their lives forever.

What I loved most about the film is that every character, even the station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) has his own insightful story to tell and share. We eventually learned he was also an orphan and has experienced the cruelty of the people in the orphanage that's why he hates kids like Hugo. Among all these we have seen each story unfold through the eyes of the 12-year-old orphan as he entertains himself with the daily whereabouts of the people at the train station (ie the love story of the station inspector and Lisette (Emily Mortimer) and of Monsieur Frick (Richard Griffith) and Madame Emilie (Frances de la Tour)).

 

It's not simply a children's movie revisiting the exciting real-life adventures and fantasy dreams made of witches and mermaids and an ambitious voyage to the moon; through this movie I was able to reflect on how Georges Melies lost his faith in his films when the people had lost interest in them. Deep sadness, maybe even leading to depression because the world seemed to have forgotten you may truly be part of human nature, but as George lingered on it for too long, he has deprived himself of the better side of his works: that even though most people have forgotten him, some people's lives were changed because of his works. Hugo had found his way home through George's automaton, and even the life and childhood of Professor Rene Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg) revolved around Melies' inspirational works.

 

Being forgotten may be part of the sad journey as one eventually says goodbye to the ever-changing world, but maybe no one is really ever forgotten: what one leaves as a legacy, how he passionately shared and taught it to others, will inevitably be passed on to the younger generation, and so even though people have forgotten his name, his legacy will forever be remembered.