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Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: PG (for thematic elements, scary situations and brief language) Theater release: December 17, 2004 by Paramount Pictures Limited release: December 17, 2004 Directed by: Brad Silberling Runtime: 1 hour 53 minutes Cast: Jim Carrey (Count Olaf), Meryl Streep (Aunt Josephine), Jude Law (Lemony Snicket), Emily Browning (Violet Baudelaire), Liam Aiken (Klaus Baudelaire), Kara & Shelby Hoffman (Sunny) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

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Having charmed the critics with his remarkably subtle performance in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Jim Carrey is back to his over-the-top ways in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events—and on one level, this dark, twisted, amusing children's movie may be a better showcase for his unique talents. The film, based on a series of best-selling children's novels, is supposed to be about three orphans who live with a series of guardians, most of them dreadful; but the show belongs, for better or worse, to the hammy, greedy, villainous Count Olaf (Carrey). As the orphans' first guardian, he tries to steal the fortune that is being held in trust for them, and when the orphans are taken away from him, he shows up in disguise, adopting a new persona for each new guardian he must plot against.

Jim Carrey is over the top, in a good way, as Count Olaf

This premise allows Carrey to play not only Count Olaf himself, but each of the personalities adopted by Count Olaf, who fancies himself the leader of an acting troupe made up of freakish folk who seem to have run away from the circus. At one point, Count Olaf pretends to be a nerdy expert on snakes named Stephano, and at another, he adopts the guise of a pipe-smoking, peg-legged, Newfie-accented seafarer named Captain Sham. Carrey seems to have had a blast making this film, but more importantly, he inhabits the part so perfectly that it is difficult to imagine anyone else in the role; while he does indulge in a few glaringly obvious Carrey-isms, such as screeching like a velociraptor during one of his "performances" or tossing off a quote from The Karate Kid (the books make no such pop-culture references), he also brings the character to life in a way that nails his unique mix of menace, vanity, and absurdity.

The film itself starts on a similarly strong note, and strikes just the right introductory tone, while giving the story's narration a more cinematic spin. The author of the books—in the real world, Daniel Handler, but in the stories, Lemony Snicket, a mysterious figure who may know at least some of the characters personally—always begins by telling the reader to put the book down and go read something more cheerful instead. The film's narrator (Jude Law) does just the same, telling us early on, "This is an excellent opportunity to walk out of the theatre, living room or airplane where this film is being shown." Lines like that perfectly capture the bleak silliness of the books, yet skillfully adapt it to a new form.

Violet (Emily Browning) and Klaus (Liam Aiken) look to minimize their unfortunate events

The story itself concerns the Baudelaires, three children whose parents die when the family mansion burns down. Violet (Emily Browning) is a mechanical genius who ties her hair up in a ribbon whenever she invents something; her brother Klaus (Liam Aiken) is a preteen bookworm with a photographic memory; and their baby sister Sunny (played by twins Kara and Shelby Hoffman) is especially good at biting things—her gurglings, incidentally, are indecipherable to all but her siblings, so the subtitles translate them for us.

The children's fates are left in the hands of Mr. Poe (Timothy Spall), the ineffectual manager of their parents' estate, who shuttles them to their new homes without ever noticing that most of the adults he turns to are rather bad guardians. After Count Olaf's initial plans are thwarted, Mr. Poe sends the children to live with the friendly Uncle Monty (Billy Connolly), whose obsession with snakes and suspicion of his fellow herpetologists blind him to Olaf's schemes, and then the paranoid, neurotic Aunt Josephine (Meryl Streep), who, despite her many fears, lives in a house perched dangerously on the edge of a cliff.

Meryl Streep as the paranoid, neurotic Aunt Josephine

Somewhere along the way, however, something gets lost. Part of the problem lies with the film's structure; it is based on the first three books (The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room and The Wide Window) and it zips through them so quickly that we never get a chance to savor the stories properly. Screenwriter Robert Gordon (Galaxy Quest) also sticks the second and third stories into the middle of the first one, and while this approach does have its merits—it is more satisfying, dramatically, to bring the story full circle than to trundle through three very different episodes—it also requires him to introduce a couple of rather awkward plot developments. (For example, Mr. Poe might be an idiot, but is he such an idiot that he would give the Baudelaires back to Count Olaf? And why does Count Olaf, who normally insists on staying "in character," abandon his disguise at a crucial point?)

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