Reviews

The husband returns to his Japanese mountain village from the Sino-Japanese war without arms, legs, ability to talk or hear much, apparently brain-damaged, and badly scarred on the face and scalp. The horror of this person's existence is amplified by the contrast with the patriotic and disconnected propaganda from the Japanese government and media that the village folk all seem to swallow without question. He is proclaimed a living War God with medals and a framed laudatory news article that hang on the wall. The village people line the streets to welcome home the living War God, cheering and marching in copy of military march, and the living War God is delivered to his unbelieving wife. Taking care of this lump of flesh will be her task from here on. She tries. She puts the food in one end, sometimes sacrificing her own food to meet her husband's demands, and wipes up the other end. He eats, sleeps, eliminates, and demands sex. This goes on and on, and one can imagine the wife's life of drudgery in an endless cycle stretching into the distant future.

Her husband has never been a nice person. He beat her on a daily basis before marching off to do his patriotic duty in war, and now that he is back, he continues to demand from her. At first food and sex, which he demands through grunts and facial expressions, are gratifying to him, but as time goes on, these lose all their appeal. As a soldier he had raped a woman in China, and the memory of this comes back to haunt him and interfere with any pleasure from sex. His wife puts him in a cart and parades him around the village, the limbless living War God on display.

The wife is dutiful but increasingly angry and despairing, and the tour of the village with her husband in the cart becomes a kind of revenge for her. Eventually in private she is mashing raw eggs into his mouth and slapping him. All the while she is looked up to in the village for her patriotic sacrifice.

This movie is a grim commentary on the discrepancy between patriotic imaginings of war and the actual brutality of war and its tragic consequences. The movie ponders the consequences of societal pressure to do one's duty on the battlefield and in marriage.

Hugo is an orphan who has found an unlikely survival niche for himself hiding behind the walls and in the remote passageways of a Parisian train station. He is barely safe and functional by himself, surreptitiously servicing the station's clocks, work he inherited from his father. Great cogs spin at different angles, symbolic of the churning forces he must negotiate, always threatening to snag him and pull him into their teeth.

He is cut off from others, watching the happenings of the rest of society through peep holes and darting out to grab leftover food and steal machine parts. The walls of the train station are essentially the walls of his personality -- there to keep others at bay. He trusts nobody; he is cut off from others. In a memorable scene where he takes a first tenuous step toward connecting to somebody, he articulates his loneliness to a girl who has taken an interest in him. Can he find a normal childhood, a childhood with parental figures that love him and care for him? He has become a feral child, a lonely child, a child who has just barely survived the double punch of losing first his mother and then his father and now scrounges out an existence cut off from others.

The station master (Sascha Baron Cohen), who seems to have lost his heart as well as the functionality of his left leg in the Great War, is determined to catch him and turn him over to an orphanage. The station master, with a hatchet sharp face and with the aid of a very pointy-nosed Dobermann (both enhanced with 3-D), is a menacing, but also ridiculous presence, determined to make the train station a place where people come to get on trains and a place where people get off. There is no room in his world for society's cast-offs and he careens through the crowded station determined to catch Hugo. The station master was an orphan himself (he has absorbed some brutal punches in his life as well), and his efforts to run a tight station have a frantic quality to them, as though he is trying to chase away the memories of his own childhood. The rules he enforces are there to hold at bay the fears he felt when he was in Hugo's shoes.

Hugo's father (Jude Law), a mechanically gifted man, would make metallic gizmos and would involve Hugo in this, father-son bonding projects. They had rescued an animatronic in disrepair at a a museum and were in the process of restoring it, when his father dies. If working, it will write, and Hugo believes, after his father is gone, that what the animatronic writes will give him a message from his lost father. When he finally restores the animatronic, it does not write at all, but instead draws a picture of a rocket ship plowing into the right eye of the man in the moon. Hugo recognizes this as an image from a movie his father would describe to him. Father and son had also shared movies together, both fully appreciative of movies' importance.

Ben Kingsley plays the role of a bitter curio shop owner in the train station, after previously being the director of numerous early movies. With WWI the importance of his movies has faded and his mini-masterpieces of the time have often been melted down to make high heels for women's shoes. It is like Bach's sheet music for his three missing Masses being used by the local butcher to wrap legs of lamb. Kingsley is intrigued by Hugo but the child's presence also stirs memories and feelings too difficult for him to handle, and he treats Hugo cruelly. Scorsese here is firmly in the tradition of Lucas -- the story told from the child's point of view and he is in a Dickensian world -- adults have forgotten what it is like to be a child and are subsequently cut off from part of their humanity. Adults have been hurt so often that empathy has been all but stomped out of them.

As Hugo gradually comes out from behind his walls, encouraged along the way by the god-daughter of Kingsley, Kingsley also lets go of some of his bitterness. This is helped by a renaissance of appreciation from others for his role in the infancy of movie making. Eventually Hugo has found another family.

The movie is a meditation on the role of movies, and in a larger sense the role of art, in our society. There are clocks everywhere, one with a great swinging pendulum from the tower of the train station, and the passage of time is a repeated motif. If we can keep movies and other art from physically disintegrating, the clock can stop ticking for them.

The 3-D is effective. The opening scene has snow flakes that seem to fall right on the heads of the audience. My five year old grandson, who watched the movie with me (and liked it), reached his hands up to grab a snow flake. In that action he paralleled the audience who saw the first movie ever made: a train pulling into a train station. The audience tried to jump out of the way, thinking they would be run over. Later in the film the train does run through the train station, people jumping out of the way in front of it -- but this turns out to be a fragment of Hugo's dream. Scorsese examines the connection between reality, movies, and dreams. The spinning cogs behind the walls of the train station are a reminder that there is a lot churning behind the surface.

Yunis, the freelance Iraqi journalist who tells this story, had been imprisoned and tortured by one of Saddam Hussein's sons, so he was no friend of that regime. When America starts dropping its bombs and raiding houses, he sets out to document what is happening to his country, courageously venturing out into the mayhem and photographing the disintegration of his country. He goes to the wedding of a friend, his brother fires off celebratory shots in the air, and soon after American military soldiers have broken into his home, capturing Yunis and his brothers at gunpoint and frightening his elderly father and mother. This marks the beginning of a Kafkaesque encounter with military detention. His protestations of innocence do not convince anybody who is in power to release him, although an American soldier who is functioning as a guard at Abu Ghraib forms a bond with him, and they develop a mutual respect. Yunis settles into prison life, eating worm-infested food, sleeping in a tent, living in squalor, and surviving various riots by disgruntled prisoners, most who appear to be in much the same situation as Yunis -- innocent people who have been swept up by indiscriminate military operations. He begins working as an interpreter and at one point is instrumental in quelling a riot. He tries to make his adjustments to this nightmarish existence, and he finds various ways to do something constructive in that context. In this crazy setting no good deed can go unpunished, and he is transfered to the most restrictive part of Abu Ghraib, where he is interrogated and accused of plotting with his brothers to kill Tony Blair! After nine months of captivity he is finally released, the prison camp commander tells him he is no longer a suspect, and he is given an apology for his imprisonment. Yunis goes back to his family with his brothers. There he feels as though he is in a dream, expecting to wake up still imprisoned.

This is a disturbing film. It shows American soldiers carrying out operations in a foreign country that destroy people's lives because of the folly of their judgments. It shows American military incarcerating innocent people in very dehumanizing conditions. This Iraqi journalist is trapped in this very strange world --it feels like being held under water. Yunis has experienced it from both sides -- malicious brutality from the regime of Saddam Hussein and then again from the occupying forces of United States. Does America descend to the moral equivalent of the regime they overthrew? This documentary seems to suggest so, although there is some redemption through the voice of one American guard, who describes his experiences in Abu Ghraib and his attempts to bring some sanity to that insane situation.

I would have liked subtitles when Yunis is speaking. His English is certainly understandable, but at times it is a struggle.

This is a movie that partly succeeds on the basis of culture shock (four babies from four completely different cultures), while at the same time the babies and their parents have so much in common with each other. That tension keeps this documentary fascinating. The African baby plays in the dirt at the foot of his mother, sees a bone in the dirt, and picks it up and puts it in his mouth. The mother doesn't jump up to intervene, as all of my cultural training was shrieking for her to do. So am I a bit jumpy about babies and germs? This movie made me wonder. The baby from Mongolia is wrapped in swaddling so tight I almost expected the nurse to put her foot up on the swaddled baby to pull the strap tighter. The Japanese baby is enrolled in a class for infants and their mothers, exercising and singing songs together -- a type of pre-pre-pre-school for the youngest of all. So parents from all over the world do it in vastly different ways, and this movie shows this with a camera that sits there and observes unobtrusively, all in super-saturated color. The mothers have in common that they are all loving and nurturing with their babies. They are all naturals, interacting calmly and lovingly with their babies. How they do that is modified by the circumstances of their different environments.

I can't wait to show this movie to my four year old grandson. I want him to know how different and yet how similar people are across the world.

This is one of the best mountaineering films -- up there with Touching the Void. It is artfully constructed, beginning with a lighthearted romp in the Alps by the two protagonist climbers and ending with the full menacing power of the Eiger pounding them as they fight for their lives. It evokes the terror of people off for an adventure and getting in way over their heads. The terrorizing scenes on the mountain contrast with the spectators below, who warm themselves by a cozy fire and drink wine and eat fine food, dimly aware of what the mountaineers are going through, yet caught up in the romance of a first ascent of the North Face, as seen through a telescope on the deck of the restaurant.

The movie is a meditation on the role of the press and the chasm between the news account of an event and the reality of the event itself. News reports are as detached from the reality of what is occurring on the mountain as the spectators with their telescopes down below.

The climbing seems authentic -- there is no Sylvester Stallone swinging by one hand with a grimace on his face, no Tom Cruise doing a fancy back-to-the-wall climbing move never before seen on a rock wall. These are either very competent mountaineers or very good facsimiles.

The female love interest evolves through the movie. At first she is a mousy secretary, easily bullied by her supervisors. Eventually she finds her own strength, and in doing so she begins acting on the basis of what she thinks is important and becomes an appealing person in her own right.

The photography is stunning.