his film opens with a colorful Rankin-Bass-like animated sequence of "The Littlest Elf." But narrator Lemony Snicket (Jude Law) intones, "I'm sorry to say, this is not the movie you will be seeing."
Rather, the audience will see the extremely unpleasant tale of the Baudelaire children: Violet (Browning), a gifted inventor; Klaus (Aiken), a voracious reader; and Sunny (Kara and Shelby Hoffman), the baby whose chief pleasure is biting things.
Mr. Poe (Timothy Spall), the family's lawyer, fetches them on the beach with some extremely bad news. The children's parents have perished in a mysterious fire that has completely destroyed their capacious Boston mansion. Just like that, Snicket says, the Baudelaire children became the Baudelaire orphans.
Mr. Poe has instructions to deliver the children to their closest relative. Misinterpreting that instruction, he takes them to their nearest relation: Count Olaf (Carrey), a bad actor in several senses of the word. Olaf, who dwells in a decrepit Victorian house, welcomes the children into his home. But it quickly becomes clear he has one thing on his mind: their inheritance.
After the children, using their considerable intellectual resources, avoid Olaf's attempts to kill them, they find themselves shuffled off to other relatives. There's kindly Uncle Monty (Billy Connolly), a herpetologist with a house full of reptiles, and fearful Aunt Josephine (Streep), who is afraid of everything from doorknobs to refrigerators.
Each time, a stranger appears, intent on imperiling the childrens' welfare. Though the children immediately recognize the interloper as the nefarious Olaf, the adults ignore their warnings and remain oblivious to Olaf's machinations. Can the Baudelaires survive such treachery?
A fortunate cinematic event
Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, based on the best-selling series of children's books by San Francisco-based author Handler, manages the considerable feat of capturing the books' dark humor and twisted tone in a fable that will appeal to both kids and grownups alike. With deliberately stagy sets, anachronistic costumes and props and a muted color palette, Lemony Snicket seems like a Tim Burton movie by way of Charles Addams, yet has a look and feel all its own. Silberling (Moonlight Mile) says the ironical tone and fantastical milieu soften what might otherwise be perceived as a tale about child abuse, transforming the dark story into a grim fairy tale with a human face.
Carrey continues to amaze, after his understated lead role in this year's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. His Count Olaf is no mere caricature, but a full-fledged character that calls to mind a bird of prey in a bad actor's feathers. It's no small thing for an actor to portray a bad actor badly portraying a bevy of other, colorful characters, but Carrey pulls it off.
Streep's performance as the timorous Aunt Josephine is the highlight among a gaggle of small supporting adult roles by such estimable actors as Connolly, Catherine O'Hara, Spall and Jennifer Coolidge.
But Lemony Snicket's heart and soul belong to Browning, the 16-year-old Australian actress, and Aiken, a 14-year-old American best known as one of Tom Hanks' sons in Road to Perdition. Browning, especially, has great screen presence and dignity, and Aiken's soulful sadness permeates the story.
Laudably, the filmmakers have not shied away from the darker implications of the story. As Carrey himself has observed, the film has no meaning if there is no real danger. But it's a credit to Silberling and the others that the film's understated emotional truths anchor its fantasy.
