When Life Gives You Lemony

Movie Review:
Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events

PG / 1 hr., 47 min / 2004

The danger in getting extremely excited about an upcoming movie is that one might end up over-anticipating, so that the film, once finally viewed, ends up being not really a bad film, but a disappointment in relative terms. Such was my case with Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. I absolutely loved the theatrical trailer, which presents a movie I very much wanted to see (despite having never read a word from Mr. Snicket’s typewriter). But once I saw the feature, I felt a little let down.

The film is based on the first three books of the series – The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room, and The Wide Window – which follow the unfortunate tale of the Baudelaire children: Violet, the inventive oldest sister (Emily Browning); Klaus, the bookworm (Liam Aiken); and Sunny, the two-year old biter (alternately Kara Hoffman and Shelby Hoffman). These three are suddenly rendered orphans when a fire burns their house to the ground with their parents in it (all of which is off-screen so your tots won’t be horrified within the first five minutes). The family banker, Mr. Poe (Timothy Spall), takes the children to live with their closest relative, the eccentric – and, we soon discover, sinister – Count Olaf (Jim Carrey).

Olaf makes no charade to disguise his real reason for accepting the orphans: He wants the Baudelaire fortune. But since the fortune will not pass to the guardian until the wards die, Olaf sets out to kill them. This is, of course, a dark theme, and one which I would not rush to display before children, although the theater I was in was heavily laden with impressionable youngsters. If there’s a plus side, it’s that the dark themes of this movie are much more subtle than, for instance, Addams Family Values, in which Wednesday and Pugsley commit flagrantly fatal acts upon their newest sibling – and that theater was also filled with impressionable youngsters. Do parents not think anymore? But this is a tangent.

When Olaf’s plan to have the children killed by locking them in a car parked on the railroad tracks fails, Mr. Poe removes them from his custody – not because Olaf tried to kill them, but because he left the youngest, Sunny, in the driver’s seat unattended. Neither Mr. Poe nor any other adults in the film seem to believe the children when they tattle on their uncle.

The second foster parent is Monty Montgomery (Billy Connolly), a reptilian expert, who plans to pack the children off to Peru on a little adventure – until Count Olaf shows up disguised as a fellow scientist. I’m not spoiling anything by pointing out that it is indeed Olaf in disguise, because, although the make-up job is quite good, the children announce it is Olaf just seconds after seeing him. Once again, the dim-witted adult (what is the movie trying to say here?) doesn’t believe the children for a moment. I am not of the extreme view that adults should believe and side with every fancy that a child spurts forth, but I think the grown-ups in the film could have been made a little more sympathetic and/or intelligent.

The third foster home involves Aunt Josephine (Meryl Streep) who lives practically over the sea, in a shanty that juts out off a high cliff, supported by a rickety collection of beams. There is a comic irony here, because the aunt herself is paranoid about everything (“Don’t get too close to the refrigerator – it might fall and crush you!”). Oh, and Olaf shows up in disguise. I get the idea this is the format of each book in the entire series.

The plot is somewhat episodic this way, given that it comes from three volumes in an ever-expanding series of books. But I do not feel this is a flaw. Momentum is successfully maintained throughout the stor(ies), and it feels like a coherent whole despite its derivation from multiple sources.

I am always hesitant when a film has Jim Carrey cast in anything but a normal human role. He does human well (The Truman Show, The Majestic). When he is given unrestrained freedom, he is unbearable (Ace Ventura: Pet Detective). However, and this is important, when his manic personality has a reason for existing, he can be delightful (The Mask). Here, Olaf is a decidedly overboard and terrible actor, so Carrey is an appropriate choice. But he is actually more entertaining, I think, when he is playing Olaf in disguise. His Italian scientist and his Irish sailor are intriguing to study as he performs them.

The relative newcomers as the Baudelaire children are adequate, given that the script does not place them in highly demanding situations. The script and director even seem to have deliberately removed opportunities for Miss Browning and Mr. Aiken to really act, such as in the scene where they learn of their parents’ deaths and simply stare at Mr. Poe standing on the beach.

Billy Connolly (Timeline) and Meryl Streep (Death Becomes Her) seem to have fun in their supporting roles. Both are eccentric and amusing caricatures, Aunt Josephine more so than Uncle Monty. Streep must have been exhausted after every take – she is constantly jittery. For a bonus chuckle, watch her pince-nez: They bounce on her nose as if they are spring-loaded.

Other actors are not on screen enough to be noticed, really, which is a shame, because Timothy Spall (Nicholas Nickleby), Jennifer Coolidge (Best in Show), and Catherine O’Hara (Beetlejuice, Home Alone) are such talented and entertaining performers. And movie-goers familiar with Jane Lynch (Best in Show, A Mighty Wind) will get a kick out of her three-second cameo.

Academy-Award winner Rick Heinrichs (Sleepy Hollow) is responsible for the production design, and earned another Oscar nomination because of it. Under his artistic eye, the entire look of the film is excellent, a fantasy world evoking the same visual enjoyment I got out of the Harry Potter movies, and anything directed by Terry Gilliam or Tim Burton (a friend of Heinrichs’). Olaf’s house is a ghoulish run-down gothic mansion with carved eyes in several niches and sconces; the countryside is a depressing brown haze; the lakeside town is almost a painting.

And now to the disappointments, the largest of which are what I perceive to be anachronisms, elements out of place for the time and setting. Although the story is apparently set in a fairly contemporary Boston, the film looks and feels like a fantasy version of pre-war England, a notion that the British accents of Mssrs. Spall and Jude Law (Closer) had cemented in my mind not five minutes into the production. I was led to expect something old-fashioned and highly stylized. While this is largely achieved, director Brad Silberling allows a significant number of slips, in things like Carrey’s occasional use of modern lingo (“Let’s cast this puppy!”) in amongst his more grandiose verbal gestures, the presence of a Chrysler Imperial (and an ugly one at that), and Cedric the Entertainer as a police inspector. Certainly no racial offense intended, but Cedric’s very African-American voice simply does not fit the aura created by the other elements of the film. Neither does Olaf’s consuming a beverage from a fast-food paper cup. I could go on.

I suspect these elements are not so much the slips I accuse them of being, but rather evidence that Silberling simply failed to solidify the rules under which his fictional world would function. In the end, these inconsistencies do nothing except wrench us unexpectedly out of the setting that was so beautifully established in the opening few minutes.

The score by Thomas Newman takes some getting used to. I like the riff he employs when Uncle Monty enters the Reptile Room and again when Aunt Josephine opens her Wide Window, but overall the film cries out for the comic menace of either Danny Elfman or Alan Silvestri (Mouse Hunt – what a beautiful Main Title Theme). Very little of the score stands out as anything appreciable; I think the best moment is the musical number, “Loverly Spring,” right at the beginning. And Newman’s composition for the closing credits is just plain wrong – horribly out of place, like the Imperial and Cedric.

I have a natural love for wonderfully fantastic tales set in somewhat off-kilter worlds, especially as viewed through the eyes of a child. I think of the works of Roald Dahl, John Bellairs, and the tales of Dr. Seuss. From what I saw in this film, the works of Lemony Snicket could be added to the list – his stories carry all the necessary ingredients to make the kind of film I could positively drool over. But this first entry, in what I hope will be an ever-improving series, feels a little undercooked. Which is unfortunate.

My Score: 7