**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Jim Carrey, Liam Aiken, Emily Browning, Kara & Shelby Hoffman, Jude Law, Timothy Spall, Billy Connolly, Catherine O’Hara, Luis Guzman, Craig Ferguson, Cedric the Entertainer, Jennifer Coolidge, and Meryl Streep
Directed by Brad Silberling & written for the screen by Brad Gordon, from the books by Lemony Snicket (aka Daniel Handler)
2004
108 min PG
“Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events” is a great idea for a movie. That it doesn’t quite come together is a shame. It’s cut from the same cloth as the “Harry Potter” films, in which heroic young orphans seek the murderers of their parents while surrounded by hyper-gothic architecture and gifted character actors. Ominous secrets which cannot be revealed until the next movie abound. I can’t honestly remember if anyone involved has any magic powers or not, but there were enough three-eyed toads and Rube Goldberg escapes, like using an umbrella as a grappling hook, that magic would fit right in.
Harry Potter” behaves as if we’ve never seen a secret passage or a magic tunnel before, and can get a little tedious in how seriously it takes itself. But “Lemony Snicket” has no such illusions; the evil uncle knows that we know he’s the evil uncle and he makes that clear within seconds. He snickers after telling the children to never set foot in his forbidden tower. “Lemony Snicket” is almost a parody of the “Potter” films, and if you’ve listened to “Wizard People Dear Reader,” the unauthorized alternate audio track for the first “Potter” movie, you know how in need of parodying they are.
Unfortunately, and I hate to admit this, “Snicket” is not nearly as well-plotted as “Potter.” Just about everything hinges on the grown-ups being amazingly dense and gullible, not just once, but over and over again. You could take them snipe hunting at least a dozen times. We find ourselves stuck in a loop in which the orphans go to live with a new relative, he or she is killed by the evil uncle, and the process repeats itself. This no-doubt-first-in-a-series stops after three relatives, because three is a good number, but it could have gone on forever. Both “Lemony Snicket” and “Harry Potter” succeed where the other fails. If we could combine the two and have Lemony Rowling, then we’d have some real fun.
I can understand why the adults in “Lemony Snicket” are so stupid. First, children often don’t feel like their elders take them very seriously at all, and it’s refreshing for them to see this in action. Second, grown-ups in movies like this tend to, yes, be amazingly stupid, and by making them really, really dumb “Lemony Snicket” hopes to make light of this convention. Maybe if Violet and Klaus had tried less hard to make each successive relative understand what was going on, and just threw up their hands in dismay when they finally end up with Aunt Josephine, maybe the joke would have worked.
But there is so much to like in “Lemony Snicket” and I laughed many times. Events are narrated by Snicket himself (voiced by Jude Law, although the shadowy silhouette at the typewriter may be a stand-in), who’s kind of like H.P. Lovecraft in that most of his prose is expended on adjectives for how horrible and unpleasant everything we are about to witness is. Again and again, as he describes the death of parents and loved ones—all shown in long shot or not at all—he urges us to see another, more cheerful movie, and promises that things are only going to get worse and worse. He’s amusing, in a wordy kind of way. Much of the movie’s humor is like the title itself, in which bad things happen but we laugh instead of cry, because our narrator has buried them in so many words and twisted little English major jokes. He doesn’t steal the classic Dave Barry line “the feather floated to the ground in exactly the way that a cinder block doesn’t,” but he comes close.
Snicket tells us, in patently ominous tones, of the Baudelaire orphans, Violet (Emily Browning), Klaus (Liam Aiken), and Sunny (infant twins Kara and Shelby Hoffman), each a gentle spoof of the resourceful child. Violet invents things, Klaus is a voracious reader who never forgets a word he reads, and Sunny can bite through anything. One of the movie’s many pleasures is that, in continually flashing back to Klaus reading up on the exact thing which is endangering them, we get to see book titles like “Inheritance Law and You.” After the family banker (the great Timothy Spall) tells them, in a laughably insensitive way, that their parents have died in a fire, he takes them to live with one relative after another, the first being the struggling stage actor Count Olaf. Jim Carrey plays Olaf as a joke on the Dickensian miser, working the children like slaves, calling the baby a monkey, and obviously, within seconds of being introduced to them, planning to murder them to get their parents’ money. Carrey’s mania tends to get on my nerves if it’s not tied to anything, but here he has clear, broad, mustache-twirling villainy to keep him in line.
Next is another uncle, Dr. Montgomery Montgomery. My wife and I couldn’t decide if he was Billy Connolly doing a John Cleese impersonation or John Cleese doing his best Billy Connolly. (It’s Billy Connolly.) He’s a lovable reptile scientist, living in a house of wonders and filled with curiousity about the world. A perfect guardian for the children, he doesn’t last long. Next is their Aunt Josephine (more charming scenery chewing from Meryl Streep), who seems to be in constant, black-garbed Victorian mourning for her late husband. A former adventurer, she now lives in constant dread of everything—paper cuts, exploding appliances, refrigerators falling over, whatever—which makes her choice of living on a stilt-house, dangling over the shores of Lake Lachrymose wonderfully inexplicable. Then Count Olaf arrives, disguised as the peg-legged Captain Sham, and the kiddies know she’s done for. All these figures are connected, however strangely, by a photograph in which they are all featured holding golden looking glasses. This prompts an observation from Klaus: “isn’t it odd how we’re not related to any of our relatives?”
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