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.

Movie review: What Dreams May Come "The tragic myth of heaven"

"It's not about understanding. It's about not giving up."

Just how do you spell "love"? Just how far would you go to prove it? For Chris Nielson (Robin Williams), it means choosing hell over heaven just  to be with his wife Annie (Annabella Sciorra). Literally.

I once thought dreams are simply blurred and distorted images made by our subconscious minds--meaningless, confusing and even nightmarish. I never thought it could be our heaven, because it's all in our minds after all.

What shook me to tears in Vincent Ward's What Dreams May Come (1998) was Chris's undying love for his wife. When he died, he was advised in heaven that his thoughts for her would fade away in time but he refused to let go and even searched for her in hell after she committed suicide, even if it means staying there with her.

The face of hell

Just how big is the commitment in such relationships? My mentor Ms. Josephine Bonsol once said love is not about feeling anymore for it only further breaks the connection with its subjective setbacks. Love does not require a single emotion, and you show your love because you simply want to. She said it's more of a decision while you give all the love even without saying it.

When Chris died, he still longed for his wife. Even if paradise was right in front of him, his paradise was still being with Annie, as he saw his heaven in one of her majestic paintings. He didn't listen to anybody and even risked losing his mind in hell just to bring back his wife. Maybe this is what soul mates--and true love--simply mean.

We would think how heroic it might be when one gives up his own heaven and takes a ship back to the one place we all pray to the holy ghost we would not fall into--hell. Out in the real world we all want to go to heaven because we simply hate suffering. But for Chris, suffering is part of life and he simply hates not being with his wife.

It took me to a lot of tears especially when Chris found his daughter Marie (Jessie Brooks Grant) in heaven disguised as a beautiful Asian woman named Leona (Rosalind Chao, The Joy Luck Club). The movie brought me to more tears when he finally discovered his son Ian (Josh Paddock) as he remembered "he would be with his son even in hell".

Ms. Josephine Bonsol was right: the movie was deeply touching as I cried over Chris's message to his wife, that he couldn't forgive himself because he once said "he couldn't join her" to insanity after their children died, as he tried to push all the pain he even distanced himself to "the woman he loves the most".

Sometimes when you win, you lose.

And sometimes when you lose, you win. What Dreams May Come is a story about not giving up, and a challenge for all of us to face and express what true love really means.