Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (Paramount, DreamWorks, Nickelodeon, Kumar Mobiliengesellschaft mbH & Co. Projekt Nr. 2 KG, Parkes/MacDonald Image Nation, Scott Rudin Productions, 2004)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, February 5) at 9 I ran my husband Charles and I a genuinely charming film from the backlog: Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, the original 2004 version with Jim Carrey as the piece’s principal villain, greed-driven actor Count Olaf. So far there’s also been a 2017 remake as a TV miniseries for Netflix with Neil Patrick Harris in Carrey’s role. Barry Sonnenfeld, who’s credited on this version as “executive producer” and was originally slated to direct until Brad Silberling replaced him, returned to the property and directed 10 of the 25 episodes of the Netflix series. Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events began as a tween-age book series by Daniel Handler, who invented the alter ego “Lemony Snicket” not only as a pseudonym but to make ironic frame-breaking comments on the action, a gimmick carried over in Robert Gordon’s screenplay based on the first three of Handler’s books, The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room and The Wide Window. The film not only makes “Lemony Snicket” an on-screen character but casts two actors as him: James Henderson to sit at a portable typewriter and supposedly concoct the stories (there’s a marvelous scene in which the action comes to a dead stop so Snicket can unjam his typewriter ribbon) and Jude Law, a much bigger “name,” to provide the voice-over narration. The movie begins with a computer-animated scene supposedly from a cartoon called The Littlest Elf, complete with a theme song of the expected sappiness (written, obviously with tongues firmly in cheeks, by Thomas Newman – Randy Newman’s cousin – and Bill Bernstein), before “Snicket” cuts in and informs us that the movie we’re about to see isn’t The Littlest Elf (“if you wanted to see that, please go to theatre 2,” Snicket says, making me wonder what happened if any theatre owners actually booked this film into theatre 2) but something a good deal darker.

Then we finally meet the central characters: the Baudelaire siblings, 14-year-old daughter Violet (Emily Browning), with a flair for invention that makes her come off as a pre-pubescent female MacGyver; 12-year-old son Klaus (Liam Aiken, whose remarkable authority in the part makes me curious to see some of his adult work); and infant daughter Sunny (identical twins Kara and Shelby Hoffman, using a typical casting dodge to avoid breaking the laws restricting how many hours a child can work), who’s at the stage in life where he speaks in incomprehensible gurgles and bites everything in sight. (There’s a marvelous recurring shot in which she’s shown suspending herself from the Baudelaires’ dinner table with just her teeth, and another charming scene of a Scrabble board in which all the tiles have had their corners chewed off by Sunny’s unstoppable dentation.) The plot kicks into high gear when a fire destroys the Baudelaires’ home and kills their parents (Rick Heinrichs as Mr. Baudelaire and Amy Brennerman and Helena Bonham Carter apparently doubling as Mrs. Baudelaire). The kids are told it was a freak accident involving an electrical storm, but as the film progresses we gradually realize it was all part of a sinister plot by Count Olaf and his troupe of laughably incompetent actors to grab hold of the Baudelaire family fortune by getting himself appointed as the children’s guardian and then quietly murdering them. The family attorney and executor of the Baudelaire estate, Mr. Poe (Timothy Spall), is suspicious of Count Olaf’s motives but can’t do anything to stop him. At one point the kids run away from Count Olaf and seek shelter in the home of their Uncle Monty (Billy Connolly), a snake collector and herpetologist who plans to adopt them and take them to Peru on his next snake-hunting expedition, but Count Olaf disguises himself as Stephano, gets a job as Uncle Monty’s assistant and offs him.

The children’s next stop on their odyssey to stay out of Olaf’s clutches is the seaside home of Aunt Josephine (Meryl Streep in a bizarre role she probably had a lot of fun playing). Aunt Josephine lives in a beachfront house overlooking a lake filled with leeches that hunger for human food, but only eat people who’ve themselves eaten something within the past hour (which is how she lost her beloved husband). Count Olaf disguises himself as salty sea Captain Sham – apparently there was a real “Captain Sam” in the original dramatis personae and he was played by Wayne Flemming, but his scenes were left on the cutting-room floor – and pays court to Josephine. Later he pushes her out of her window, a large bay window with a round pane in the center that acts as a lens and focuses the sun’s rays (which was how Captain Olaf burned down the Baudelaire home and killed the kids’ parents), but the suicide note Olaf forced her to write is full of spelling errors, and knowing how much Josephine was a stickler for correct spelling and grammar, they realize it’s a code and Josephine is still alive, though hiding in a local cave. Later there’s a scene in which Josephine’s house starts crumbling and falls into the sea, and Violet works out an elaborate way to save her and Klaus’s lives. The film’s climax occurs in a production of a play Count Olaf has written for his theatrical troupe, which is supposed to end with the wedding of Olaf’s character and Violet – only Olaf has arranged for a real justice of the peace to play the part, made sure the dialogue in the marriage scene fulfills the legal requirements, and set it up so he and Violet will be married legally during the performance and then he can kill her and grab the fortune. Olaf blackmails Violet and Klaus into going along with this by kidnapping Sunny and suspending her in an iron cage which he can lower and use to kill her with a remote control he carries – only Klaus figures it all out and uses the lens in the window of Josephine’s former home to lower Sunny’s cage safely and burn the marriage license as soon as Violet signs it. (Earlier Klaus has questioned whether a 14-year-old girl can get married, and Olaf smirks that she can if she has the permission of her guardian – who of course is Olaf himself.) Ultimately Olaf gets his comeuppance and the kids are rescued by Mr. Poe, and there’s even a “The End” title over the final scene just before the credit roll.

A Series of Unfortunate Events is a movie that worked overtime at being “charming,” but managed to achieve it. The film’s Wikipedia page quotes Jim Carrey as saying he worked up his accent as Olaf as a mash-up of Orson Welles and Bela Lugosi, but to me he sounded more like Vincent Price than either Welles or Lugosi – much to his credit. But it’s Liam Aiken that made this movie for me; though still a child, he acted the part with complete power and authority and, as I mentioned above, it makes me want to see some of his adult roles. Though the plot of the film isn’t at all like The Addams Family, the visual “look” of it is very much influenced by that – even the relatively crude drawings of the Baudelaire kids we see during the opening and closing credits are like the New Yorker cartoons by Charles Addams that inspired The Addams Family on both TV and film. (It’s interesting to note that Barry Sonnenfeld, the director originally assigned to this film, made both the 1991 The Addams Family theatrical film with Raul Julia and Angelica Huston and its 1993 sequel, Addams Family Values.) I quite liked A Series of Unfortunate Events, and among the elements that particularly pleased me are the “timelessness” of it – though certain scenes include at least relatively modern technology (including that sinister remote control with which Olaf threatens Sunny) and others are 20th century retro (like the Kaiser-Frazer auto Mr. Poe drives the kids around in), still other scenes look like they could have been dreamed up by Charles Dickens in the 19th century. And the DVD came with a set of deleted scenes that for once actually added to the entertainment value of the film; frankly, though they might have made the film too long for some audiences, they also would have made the movie richer, deeper and more charming if they’d been included.