Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 6/20/2026

Hugo

The movie world continues to make quality films from time to time, and fifteen years ago Martin Scorsese released what I think is one of his best films, the adaptation of the novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick. The novel is a children's novel, several hundred pages long but with minimal words on each page and heavily illustrated in black and white pictures. However, I did not care at all about the novel when the film was announced. All I cared about was that Martin Scorsese was making a new movie.

It came, it went. I saw it in theaters, but it was a financial failure. Most people seem to have completely forgotten about it, most people seemingly dismissing it because it's a Scorsese movie that's not a gangster movie. That's all he makes, right? And he's making a children's movie? In 3D? He jumped on that bandwagon? There is every reason to ignore this, right?

Well, I love the film. I've purchased it twice (once on Blu-ray and once the 4K disc), and I've seen it half a dozen times. A couple of weeks ago, though, I decided to actually read the source novel with an eye towards the questions of adaptation. What did Scorsese (and screenwriter John Logan) change? What did they add? What did they take away?

The Story

The story itself is obviously something that would attract Scorsese. It's about the title character Hugo Cabret, an orphan in 1928 whose father died in a fire in a museum where he was working. Hugo's uncle took him in. Claude Cabret maintains the clocks in Gare-du-Nord in Paris. However, we start the story with Hugo alone, his uncle having disappeared for months, maintaining the clocks himself and stealing parts from the toy store in the train station owned by Papa Georges. Hugo is stealing parts to fix an automaton that Hugo's father found in the museum, convinced that it will provide him some kind of secret message from his father once fixed.

Hugo gets caught by Papa Georges, forced to work for him to retrieve the notebook his father had kept detailing the progress with repairs, befriends Papa Georges' goddaughter Isabelle, and discovers that Papa Georges not only designed the automaton but is also George Melies, the pioneering French filmmaker. Hugo's discovery of Papa Georges through the automaton ends up fixing both Hugo's lack of family and Papa Georges' sense of failure at having been forgotten by the world, having been forced to sell his movies to a chemical company who melted them down for heels for women's shoes. The discovery also brings the attention of a French film academic who brings Melies back to the limelight, and all is well with the world of Hugo Cabret.

All of this is nearly identical in both film and novel. The movement of the plot has a handful of changes into a film. Hugo and Isabelle get injured near the middle of the novel, and that's been excised. There's an extra character, Etienne, who acts as a middle-man to connect Hugo and the film academic in the book who's completely gone in the film. However, those are relatively small changes. Hugo's journey, the overall structure of the story, and the dual character repairs between Hugo and Georges are the same. Scorsese took out very little.

He did add a lot, though.

Broader and Deeper


It seems obvious that Brian Selznick enjoys movies. The book is about movies, movie history, and even the use of illustrations in the film are meant to mimic camera movements. There's an opening series of illustrations that effectively make it a pan and zoom from outside Paris in the sky and into Gare-du-Nord (which Scorsese replicates in the film).

However, no matter how much Selznick enjoys movies, he does not enjoy movies nearly as much as Martin Scorsese, the man whose childhood was defined by looking out his apartment window in NYC at the kids who could play while he couldn't because of his asthma as well as watching movies on television (where he was first exposed to the films of the British-based duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the Archers). He also established The Film Foundation, an organization dedicated to preserving and restoring films. He has a very long history of loving, protecting, and making films. He knows a lot.

And what he added into the adaptation was mostly related to side characters that help broaden the story's emotional impact but also deepen the story's appreciation of film, in particular with regard to French film history.

Tati


The additions to the story are mainly around four characters. The station inspector is in the novel, mainly as a generic antagonistic force without much character. Madame Emile and Monsieur Frick are essentially just named store owners who end up helping chase Hugo around late in the novel.

All three of these characters get a lot more time in the film. Madame Emile and Monsieur Frick's additions are mostly silent as Frick tries to woo Emile, but Emile's dog snips at the man. It's just a minor little subplot and comedic drama as the two try to find ways to connect despite the dog. It ends with Frick getting his own dog, and it's a nice addition. Showing another pair of people finding a connection in the train station, a minor way to reinforce the movie's central ideas.

The station inspector gets the most attention, being that antagonistic presence in the story, and the most additions come from a new character created for the film, Lisette. She is a middle-aged woman who sells flowers in the train station that the station inspector yearns for but can't speak to. There are these wonderful moments where the station inspector simply struggles to approach her because of him being very self-conscious of the metal brace on his leg, necessary because of a wound from WWI, and these moments strike me clearly as references to the comedy films of Jacques Tati.

Jacques Tati was a French filmmaker whose cinematic persona was centered around his character M. Hulot. M. Hulot was the star of several of his films, a perennially polite man befuddled by and trying to navigate in a modern world that was increasingly absurd and distancing. His most well-known film is Playtime, a film he self-financed that was also a financial bomb that lead him to living in, essentially, destitution for the rest of his life. The central element of it was the large set called Tativille, a shiny, urban environment with large interior sets and exterior sites that is often held up as one of the most impressive feats in production design in film history.

It's hard not to see a comparison between Tativille and Scorsese's bringing of Gare-du-Nord to cinematic life. A large set (with digital extensions, this ain't all real) filled with human life with bits of human comedy that recall the style of storytelling that Tati did? If this isn't a Tati-inspired series of choices, I'll eat my hat.

Now, this is not important in and of itself. Police Academy 6: City Under Siege has Jacques Tati references, and it's supposedly not very good (I haven't seen it, I just know that the references are there). References don't make films good or bad. However, Scorsese isn't just referencing Tati, he's bringing human emotion to the references that add to the central emotional core. The station inspector finding ways to connect with Lisette despite his feelings of brokenness because of his leg mirrors Hugo and Papa Georges finding each other and fixing each other. It's just told in this Tati-esque manner at the same time.

Adaptation


Is the book always better?

It's a common enough assumption and impression, but I always imagine some kind of long-form adaptation of Jaws that completely lacks the excitement and punch of the Steven Spielberg film but retains more of the novel by Peter Benchley. Hugo, though, is going to be my central counter-argument from now on, though.

Brian Selznick wrote a good book. It's definitely for children, but the combination of story, characters, illustrations, and ending come together to make a satisfying little adventure through a French train station and early cinema history.

Martin Scorsese, though, makes it so much more. He takes everything that's good of the book, and he finds ways to make it all simply better. He finds ways to make the emotional impact hit harder. He finds ways to make the appreciation of cinema more encompassing. He finds ways to bring all these additions together to create a finished product that ends up feeling like an improved draft, like Scorsese acted as an editor who pushed the story into new, better directions that feel natural from the intention of the original author.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret was a book that wanted to be a movie. Martin Scorsese made it into Hugo using all of his technical skill and cinematic acumen to do it.

It is honestly one of the best examples of adaptation I can think of.

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

Toy Story 5

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

The Brides of Dracula (Rating 2/4) Full Review "This is a film that seems to have so little story that it just revels in prim properness for long stretches, and it just sucks all the joys the film could have out of it." [Library]

The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll, or House of Fright, or Jekyll's Inferno (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "It entertains well enough, but it really could have reached a bit higher. " [YouTube]

Sword of Sherwood Forest (Rating 3/4) Full Review "Honestly, the film doesn't ask too much, and it largely delivers. That's not too bad." [Tubi]

A Weekend with Lulu (Rating 1/4) Full Review "Really, the film is light in tone but unable to find any comic reason to really exist even though the situation, characters, and setting are actually rife with that potential." [Library]

The Curse of the Werewolf (Rating 3/4) Full Review "Could this have been the great werewolf movie? I really think so. Hammer was never going to invest in the three hour version, though, so I have to celebrate the solid werewolf adventure I got." [Archive.org]

Taste of Fear, or Scream of Fear (Rating 3/4) Full Review "Effective, stylish, and intelligent, this is a quality find." [YouTube]

Cash on Demand (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "It's a marvelous character study, impeccably performed, and exactingly filmed." [YouTube]

Captain Clegg, or Night Creatures (Rating 3/4) Full Review "Still, the adventure, performances, and look of the film are fun. " [Library]

Please check out my videos from the last few weeks:

John Ford: The Directors Series
John Ford: The Definitive Ranking
Alexander Mackendrick: The Directors Series
Alexander Mackendrick: The Definitive Ranking
David Lynch: The Directors Series
David Lynch: The Definitive Ranking

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.
My next thread will be on 7/11.