Release Date: December 17, 2004
Starring: Emily Browning, Liam Aiken, Kara Hoffman, Shelby Hoffman, Jim Carrey, Meryl Streep, Timothy Spall, Billy Connolly, Jude Law
Directed by: Brad Silberling
Written by: Robert Gordon
Distributed by: Paramount Pictures
MPAA Rating: PG (thematic elements, scary situations, brief language)
As the film’s title suggests, a lot of bad things happen to the children heroes of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. Until recently, you would not expect to find characters like Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire orphaned by way of arson and then nearly run over by a train, eaten by a giant snake, devoured by carnivorous leaches, and swept away by a hurricane. But this is a new age of children’s films, pioneered by the protégés of Steven Spielberg and Tim Burton and manifested in the Harry Potter movies, among others. Now young heroes find their way into dangerous adventures and cross paths with devious villains in garish, sometimes frightening fantasy worlds. Sometimes being a kid can be downright scary.
Adults probably won’t find A Series of Unfortunate Events that scary -- it is only slightly more so than the Harry Potter films’ darkest moments -- but they should recognize that, like Harry Potter and Spielberg and Burton, it has a distinct sense of style (the film’s production designer, Rick Heinrichs, used to work with Burton). Directed by Brad Silberling, it is a celebration of crooked, dilapidated houses and cramped, Dickensian villages, and the one decent set piece in the whole picture -- the Baudelaire mansion, seen in flashbacks -- is burnt to the ground before the movie even begins.
That fire has far-reaching consequences for our heroes. Fourteen-year-old Violet (Emily Browning), a prolific inventor; her younger brother Klaus (Liam Aiken), a voracious reader; and their toddler sister Sunny (the twins Kara and Shelby Hoffman), who speaks in subtitled giggles and bites into almost anything, are orphaned by the fire and packed off by Mr. Poe (Timothy Spall), the well-meaning executor of their parents’ estate, to live with their “closest relative,” an actor named Count Olaf (Jim Carrey).
But Olaf is only interested in the fortune that Violet, Klaus, and Sunny have inherited, and conspires to have them killed in a number of different ways (the train, the snake, the leaches, and the hurricane) to get at the money. Our young heroes immediately uncover Olaf’s evil plan (because, well, he tells them about it), but their attempts to warn the oblivious Mr. Poe prove fruitless. And when Poe accidentally discovers Olaf’s dastardly ways, whereupon he sends the children to live with their benevolent Uncle Monty (Billy Connolly) and later their phobic Aunt Josephine (Meryl Streep), Olaf simply reinvents himself as a number of different characters to give himself more chances to see the children dead.
The story, written by Robert Gordon, is based on the first three of a series of 11 children’s books written by Daniel Handler under the nom de plume Lemony Snicket. Although the movie is occasionally disjointed and episodic as a result -- you can see the seams, like between the part of the movie when the children stay with their Uncle Monty and the part where they are sent to live with their Aunt Josephine -- Snicket appears in the film several times as the narrator (he is played by Jude Law, though he is filmed only from behind or in backlit shots so that you never see his face) in a mostly successful attempt to weave the shorter stories into a larger narrative.
It is a narrative kids will enjoy. Even though Violet, Klaus, and Sunny are almost perpetually in harm’s way, they get to thwart Olaf’s plans just as often. The movie’s dark streak of humor, precipitated by a heavily made-up Carrey in a variety of roles that allow him to ham it up as he did in movies like The Mask, Ace Ventura, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas, is clearly aimed at younger audiences (it is closer to goofy than sophisticated, though his best alias, a humorless snake expert, will have both children and adults laughing). And its main theme -- that adults don’t pay attention to kids, as in the Baudelaire children’s numerous attempts to tell Mr. Poe and the authorities about Olaf’s evil plan -- is one that a lot of younger viewers will probably identify with.
It runs about 100 minutes long, which, by the bloated standards of the Harry Potter franchise, is positively breezy. The Lemony Snicket novels are shorter than the Potter books, but some editing was clearly involved, and it is better for it. The key to adapting children’s stories to the screen is not to film every single line in the book, but to capture the essence and pack it into a movie with a short, crisp storyline. The Wizard of Oz is a great example of this: almost everyone can quickly recap the story, and it conjures up familiar images of the yellow brick road and the Emerald City. Oh, and it was only 101 minutes long.
A Series of Unfortunate Events is, of course, not quite so famous, but it does well enough for itself, and each scene has something interesting to see. Uncle Monty’s reptile room is filled with exotic creatures. Aunt Josephine’s house is perched perilously on the edge of a cliff, and a bay window looks out over a forbidding body of water, appropriately called Lake Lachrymose. Count Olaf’s mansion has a great, sweeping staircase that allows for his memorable entrance: “Hello, helllooo, helllllllloooooooo. I am your beloved ... Count ... Olaf.” The movie connects them all into an extraordinary world (with the help of Thomas Newman’s rumbling, piano-heavy score) as effortlessly as The Wizard of Oz led Dorothy from Munchkinland to the Emerald City and beyond.
I enjoyed A Series of Unfortunate Events, but I hope that Hollywood will scrap any plans it has to adapt additional Lemony Snicket books. L. Frank Baum wrote 14 stories about the land of Oz, but a less sequel-crazy Hollywood left them almost completely untouched, and today The Wizard of Oz endures as a classic fantasy tale. If more Lemony Snicket books come to the big screen, it will turn the name into a franchise, a purely commercial enterprise designed to make as much money as possible (even the lustrous Harry Potter novels have, at least partially, met with this fate). If this is the only one, however, it remains a charm of fiction and imagination, an irreplaceable portal to a strange world filled with evil counts and benevolent uncles and crooked houses and giant snakes and children on adventures that today’s youngsters may someday pass on to their grandchildren.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)