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A Series Of Unfortunate Events (Review)

Taking a moment to savor the post-party respite from holiday bustle, the girls and I attended a showing of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of unfortunate Events yesterday. Here’s the lowdown.

Brad Silberling directs this beautiful children’s nightmare.

Children are strangers in this world. As strangers, immigrants from nowhere, they rely on their parents as their guides. The main characters of this film, the Baudelaire children, have their guides taken from them in a mysterious fire that also leaves them homeless.

They are subsequently cast from one guardian to another in search of what they have lost, including home, security, and a conduit to their family’s past.

Fortunately for the Baudelaires, their parents did not leave them wholly without guidance. Their innate talents which were encouraged by their parents still serve them well. Violet has developed an ability to invent and solve problems. Klaus has a love of studying books. In the film this manifests as knowledge he has already absorbed from books, but in the original work he dives into books to find useful information, often taking reasonably long periods of time to study the text. Sonny is a mere infant, but even she has a cleverness and the ability to bite, and makes use of that.

These, our heroes, are plunged into a nightmarish vision. Literally, this film paints what appeared to me as a child’s nightmare. Ephemeral but urgent, the scenery is all slightly surreal. Count Olaf, their first replacement guardian and nemesis, is played appropriately over-the-top by Jim Carrey. I’m not much of a fan of his previous foray into screen versions of kid lit, but his depiction of Count Olaf here meshes with the surreality and discomfort inherent in the fears that exist in a child’s world. Olaf is not just mean, he’s off-kilter. He’s not predictable; his mind is incomprehensible. He’s what these children, who have come to rely on a certain order of thought, fear. He’s chaotic evil. As such, Carrey’s portrayal is quite appropriate.

The film almost resembles another of those dreamy horrors of childhood, the fairy tale. As so much of what happens is unbelievable, one can almost imagine it has been dreamed. And there is a moment in the film where the clouds seem to part and we can see our way clear to the daylight. But the night is always there, waiting to greet us when the dreams of daytime fade.

While material is heavily taken from the first 3 books, this film is basically its own story based on Lemony Snicket’s first book. Even though it reveals plot, it doesn’t ruin the books for anyone who might be interested in reading them. The experience of reading the books is much different because, as my daughter put it, none (or very few) of the details from the books are in the film. They’ve taken the main ideas and then built a film around those.

I praise that effort, because we don’t need an exact retelling of the books. If this film is taken as something separate, I think it’s a really enjoyable children’s movie, and one of the better fairy tale movies I’ve seen. The children are able to find some of what they are looking for within themselves, a time-honored message about growing up. But growing up doesn’t happen all at once, and they have found barely any of the answers they are looking for. There are no happy endings in the Baudelaire life, just moving on to the next situation.

Posted by James at December 20, 2004 9:23 AM
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