NYT review of Hugo

"This is a story shared by all children, who begin as observers and turn (if all goes well) into participants." I love this line in the review. We were all children at one point. We can all remember at least one memory from our childhood in which we watched, as an outsider, something take place. Hugo is doing this almost the entire first scene of the movie. But before we know it, his role has shifted and he winds up completely involving himself in fixing Papa Georges and his wife, the Station Inspector, and even himself. This is the true crux of the movie; Hugo's enlightenment and conquering of his insecurities and helping to conquer the insecurities of the others around him. He orchestrates the gears of the clock perfectly, as he does also the gears inside of the other characters.

As Scorsese says in his interview, "With Hugo, the fantasy is very real, but it’s in your head and in your heart. It has to do with the mechanisms — whether it’s the clocks, the interiors, the locomotives, the trains, the automaton — with the inner workings of these objects." He's completely right. The fantasy is in watching old film be incorporated into the new 3-D medium that Scorsese uses, but more importantly, the fantasy is in journeying with Hugo as he collects the pieces that are needed to fix each person. As Hugo said, no clock ever comes with an extra piece. He fixes each person, and double-checks that all the pieces are perfectly in place by the end of the movie. Hugo says he sometimes feels like a machine himself, maybe in the way that his life has been so repetitious, that he just keeps living his days in eternal purgatory, winding clocks, trying to figure out the automaton's meaning and his father's message.  But Isabelle, his saving beauty, is his partner in crime that helps him to find all the gears and put everyone back together.