REVIEWED - A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS: Lemony Snicket's first film defines movie magic, says Michael Dwyer. Along with others of a certain age, I was entirely unfamiliar with the work of Lemony Snicket until very recently, and blithely unaware that his books had been published in 39 languages and sold 27 million copies. But I now am so well informed that I know his real name is not Lemony Snicket, after all, but Daniel Handler.
Becoming acquainted with his work through the movie A Series of Unfortunate Events has been one of the pleasures of the cinematic year. Snicket himself, seen in silhouette and played by Jude Law, introduces, warns us off and narrates the episodically structured film, which is drawn from his first three books: The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room and The Wide Window.
It follows the fate of the orphaned Baudelaire children - the 14-year-old Violet (Emily Browning), Klaus (Liam Aiken), who is 12, and little Sunny (played by twins Kara and Shelly Hoffman) whose baby talk is helpfully subtitled - after the suspicious deaths of their parents.
Mr Poe (Timothy Spall), the bumbling, gullible executor of the Baudelaire estate, foolishly leaves them in the care of the louche Count Olaf (Jim Carrey), a histrionic actor with a penchant for extreme disguises. Interested only in their inheritance, this dastardly cad treats the children like slaves in his decrepit home before resorting to an old silent movie staple to dispose of them, locking them in a car in the path of an oncoming train.
The resourceful children are treated more kindly by other relatives: the benign Uncle Monty (an unusually restrained Billy Connolly), a herpetologist whose full name is Dr Montgomery Montgomery; and the phobia-addled Aunt Josephine (Meryl Streep), whose obsession with correct grammar, even in the face of mortal danger, makes Lynn Truss seem a slouch by comparison.
Streep is wonderfully deadpan as she demonstrates a rarely-tapped zest for comedy in the outstanding extended sequence set at Aunt Josephine's rickety cottage perched precariously on stilts over the leech-filled Lake Lachrymose. Carrey, by contrast, chews the scenery in a performance that's even more outsized than his portrayal of the Grinch a few years ago, but he attacks the role with an infectious sense of zany mischief.
This is a stylised, fantastical and macabre fantasy that probably is too scary for very young viewers. Imagine the dark-themed Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban crossed with the fertile visual imagination of Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands and Sleepy Hollow, and you begin to get the measure of this irresistibly entertaining adventure.
The film is imaginatively designed by Brad Heinrichs and superbly photographed by Emmanuel Lubezki, both, significantly, regular collaborators on Burton's movies, and accompanied by a stirring score from Thomas Newman.
