Overall Rating
 Awesome: 41.25%
Worth A Look: 33.75%
Just Average: 17.5%
Pretty Crappy: 4.38%
Sucks: 3.13%
11 reviews, 94 user ratings
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| Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events |
by Brad Wilber
"Thank goodness, it's not a feel-good movie"
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The Baudelaire orphans stories authored by “Lemony Snicket,” aka Daniel Handler, are famous for trusting young readers’ capacity to handle woe unreversed and malefaction unpunished. Given that the books can revel in their own cynicism, they don’t seem tailor-made for a movie franchise. Sure, Hollywood is becoming more willing to evoke a dark atmosphere in a film for children, but adopting a dark attitude remains tantamount to crossing some line in the sand. In LEMONY SNICKET’S A SERIES OF UNFORUNATE EVENTS, a film based on the first three books in a series now nearing a dozen, director Brad Silberling cannily negotiates that line, sacrificing only the nth degree of integrity to the written versions and achieving what most viewers will enjoy to the utmost.Violet, Klaus, and baby Sunny Baudelaire have lost their parents and their home in a suspicious fire. The dim-bulb family solicitor Mr. Poe (Timothy Spall) initially places them with a distant cousin, Count Olaf (Jim Carrey). Olaf is keenly interested in gaining control of the children’s sizable fortune, so he must pass himself off as ingratiating, but his true colors (abuse and derision) shine through once too often. Poe ends Olaf’s guardianship and shuttles the three kids to a succession of more benign relations, but each time a disguised Olaf pursues, worms his way into the confidence of the other kin, and delivers a coup de guerre. The kids know full well that Olaf would just as soon dispose of them as regain custody, and they have to work overtime to stay out of his clutches. Violet is a budding inventor, Klaus reads voraciously and has a photographic memory, and even Sunny contributes with a natural daring and a viselike bite.
The centrality of Jim Carrey to the proceedings is a bit of a double-edged sword. He’s an obvious casting choice here, where an outsized presence and multiple characters (Olaf, a sycophantic Italian research assistant, and a windburned old salt named Captain Sham) are required. Carrey sails through all the portrayals with undeniable panache, and there’s some effort at integrating himself into the ensemble—I appreciate that he doesn’t completely surrender to self-aggrandizing logorrhea a la Robin Williams. Carrey’s vaudevillian impersonations continually remind us that this is first and foremost a show; I’m prepared to admit that this may provide audiences with a comforting sense of remove from all the nastiness. But, on the other hand, the comedy in Carrey’s ramblings and the way they tend to drift into contemporary American idiom are somewhat at odds with the books’ moribund aura and pristine drawing-room prose. Count Olaf is a murderer, but with the role in Carrey’s hands all we seem to remember about him is that he hasn’t washed a dish in his life and that he always invites his prickly friends over to play. (All you hardcore cameo spotters out there: test yourselves to see if you can identify by name the five actors who play the members of Olaf’s theatrical troupe. I missed only the Hook-Handed Man. The credits are at the end—you’ll want to stay for the duration of those, by the way, since they are brilliantly conceived—so you won’t get any unwanted hints beforehand). A friend told me that Daniel Handler once expressed interest in Alan Rickman for the role of Olaf. Going in that direction might not have given us Hollywood’s ultimate chameleon, but we would not have forgotten that Olaf is a villain.
Where the film does score appropriate laughs using current slang is with the running gag it uses to interpret the wordless coos and shrieks of Baby Sunny (twins Kara and Shelby Hoffman). It’s great stuff. The older kids may come off seeming too placid in the face of so much injustice, but that may be part and parcel of sharing the screen with Jim Carrey and Meryl Streep. Emily Browning as Violet has the full lips and resolute quality of an incipient Jennifer Garner. Liam Aiken (STEPMOM) as Klaus does well at letting us see the wheels turning in his head while he works out the puzzles in his path. Streep is clearly having fun as their ultraphobic Aunt Josephine. Billy Connolly emanates quirky congeniality as the reptile-handling uncle Montgomery Montgomery, but he only serves to prove that there is no safety in being a nice guy.
Silberling has done features (CITY OF ANGELS, MOONLIGHT MILE) but has a much more extensive history in television, and that experience seems to help him manage the potentially whiplash transitions in an episodic story. Plus, he gets the Hollywood demand for sentiment and the reality-pill bleakness of the source material to “shake hands.” For example, the production design is gleefully Gothic but sticks mostly to the realm of the representational; my favorite set was Aunt Josephine’s house, perched high on the bluff overlooking Lake Lachrymose. There is a recurring silhouette image of the three kids cocooned in a tent playing patty-cake—it feels like a concession to the Have-a-Heart police, but the film keeps it brief and never bogs down in syrup. Lemony Snicket’s movie narration tends to linger more heavy-handedly than the books do on the themes of savoring small victories and perseverance rewarded, but Jude Law issues all of Lemony’s commentary in a wonderfully wry, jaundiced style that is an important link to the original story.If this Lemony Snicket movie is to be the first of several, they’re off to a fine start. Bring Law and all the kids back. They are impeccable. And Carrey has placed a legitimate stamp on the role of Olaf that he should continue to explore and refine; even the drawbacks of his performance have a silver lining. Yes, I had a few quibbles about fidelity to the material. Others will, too. But the bottom line is that the Lemony Snicket books tell kids not to expect any handouts from the Fates, and that comes through loudly here, both because of the film’s own considerable merits and because the other best-known movie kids of late have magic wands or super powers to give them a leg up in the world.
link directly to this review at https://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=11348&reviewer=395
originally posted: 12/22/04 07:42:09
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USA
17-Dec-2004 (PG-13)
DVD: 26-Apr-2005
UK
N/A
Australia
16-Dec-2004
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