reVIEW (10)
LEMONY SNICKET’S A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS

As a companion piece to tonight’s On The Lot review, I thought I’d wheel out this oldie but goodie, which was originally published under the title, “The Wonderful(ly Dark) World of Snicket.”

Little Red Riding Hood is eaten by the wolf. Sleeping Beauty is impregnated as she sleeps and wakes to discover she is the mother of twins.
These are just some of the fairy tales (or marchen, as they were called in German) in their original forms, before the Age of Enlightenment dealt them a crippling blow, and Disney all but obliterated them. They’re still there though, these dark, rather adult tales, there for the curious and the enthralled.
Which brings us, in a roundabout fashion, to Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, which is not unlike a dark, traditional fairy tale, though without the magic. What it lacks in spells and cantrips though, Series makes up for in mystery and deaths.
Oh, yes, there are deaths here, children. In fact, the film’s plot is triggered by death.

In one fell swoop, at the hands of a mysterious fire, the Baudelaire children (Violet, Klaus, and Sunny) suddenly find they are the Baudelaire orphans, left in the care of frustrated actor—and villain of the piece—Count Olaf (Jim Carrey). What follows is, as the title may suggest, a series of close calls, near-mishaps, and fatalities (both apparent and actual).
Clearly, this is not a Disney family movie, and early on, we are invited by Jude Law—who does a tremendous voice-over job as Lemony Snicket, relating the sad and woeful tale of the Baudelaire children to us—to leave the theatre, if we are expecting light, fluffy cuteness. He actually does this twice, and if by the second time, those of the audience who have no appreciation for the dark and the macabre are still in their seats, then they’ve effectively forfeited any right to complain.
Now, having firmly established its darkling nature, it’s time to examine the film itself.

To begin with, the star of Series is clearly its production design. It has that otherworldly feel peppered with Gothic chic that is Tim Burton’s greatest gift to mainstream cinema. Small wonder, as Series production designer Rick Heinrichs collaborated with Burton on the pretty-to-look-at-but-not-much-else Sleepy Hollow. The world of the Baudelaires is Dickens on absinthe: grand and gloomy, shadowy and cobwebbed, like a skewed cartoon where the figurative animals neither sing nor dance, but stare at you furtively from the nooks and crannies.
Don’t think this is another Sleepy Hollow though. You can actually look at other things aside from the sets. As I’ve already mentioned, Law is excellent here, as is Meryl Streep, as the overwrought and overly neurotic Aunt Josephine. As far back as She-Devil and Postcards from the Edge, Streep proved that she wasn’t just adept at accents and drama; she had a killer sense of the comedic as well, which serves her well in Series, so much so that you wish she had far more screen time than she actually does.
And Emily Browning and Liam Aiken, who play Violet and Klaus Baudelaire, respectively, though not giving breakthrough performances on the level of a Haley Joel Osment, are certainly a sight better than the three Harry Potter principals were in the first film of that franchise. (The comparison arises from the fact that Series is based on the Lemony Snicket children’s novels, The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room, and The Wide Window, enjoying the current wave of popularity kid lit is experiencing in this post-Harry Potter world of ours.)

Given that Count Olaf is a central character to the tale, it’s sad then that the weak link, performance-wise, is Jim Carrey. Let me make it clear though, that I am not the biggest Jim Carrey fan; I find there is a certain tolerance level I have where he’s concerned, which, once crossed, subsequently makes me inured to his antics. In Series, I reached that level rather quickly, so much so that I found I was happiest when Count Olaf was off-screen. The script, with its occasional modern colloquialisms in its dialogue, isn’t much help either. (Of course, it’s tricky telling where the script ends and Carrey’s ad-libbing begins.)

It’s curious that Brad Silberling ended up directing Series, which is so far afield from his previous film, Moonlight Mile, where Jake Gyllenhaal, Susan Sarandon, and Dustin Hoffman play the fiancée and parents of a recently-deceased woman, coping with their grief and sense of loss. Not only is the scope of Series so much larger than Moonlight Mile (or anything else he’s done for that matter), but the tenor of the piece is vastly different as well.
I bring this up not because Silberling botches the job, but rather because there’s nothing specific and peculiar to the direction of Series that makes it stand apart. For all I know, it could have been Barry Sonnenfeld—who directed The Addamms Family and its sequel, as well as the Men in Black films—at the helm. Perhaps if Series had been allowed to linger a little more on its characters, we might have seen some of the insightful character bits evident in Moonlight Mile. But, preoccupied as the script of Series is with how Violet, the family inventor, gets to McGyver her way out of the latest precarious predicament the dastardly Count has put her and her siblings in, there’s precious little time for those pesky things called “emotions” and “character development.”

Uneven as it is though, A Series of Unfortunate Events is an agreeable piece of macabre entertainment. It’s also a good introduction to the darkly wonderful world of Lemony Snicket. And the cameo by Dustin Hoffman (reunited with his Moonlight Mile director Silberling, and his Kramer vs. Kramer co-star, Streep, though they don’t actually share a scene together) is a nice touch, to boot.
Perhaps if we’d just seen more of the children, and more of Jim Carrey being Count Olaf (as opposed to Count Olaf being Jim Carrey), then we would have discovered characters equally as strange and interesting and darkly delightful as the world they live in.

(Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events OS’s courtesy of impawards.com.)

FAY GRIM (Review)

I’ve only ever really watched one Hal Hartley film before now: No Such Thing, with Sarah Polley and Helen Mirren, and I largely came into that movie because of those two brilliant actresses. I loved the film though, and thought Hartley’s take on the monster movie was insightful and one of those rare gems that any diehard film fan should be thankful even got made.
So, even though I’d never gotten to see Henry Fool, when Fay Grim came around the corner, and I understood that it was a sequel to Hartley’s well-regarded film, I thought to myself, Well, I’m still gonna try and see this one. After all, it had Parker Posey in it. (Like Polley and Mirren, an actress who’s tops in my books.)
Now, I really wanna see Henry Fool…

Fay Grim takes place years after Henry’s flight from justice (apparently, he killed a man in the first film), and Fay (Posey) is a frazzled single mother in Queens struggling to keep her son Ned (Liam Aiken, from Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events) out of trouble. Meanwhile, her brother Simon (James Urbaniak, who played Robert Crumb in American Splendor and can be seen in the upcoming The Nanny Diaries and the troubled Across The Universe), noted “garbage man-poet” of Queens, is serving a prison term for aiding and abetting Fool in his escape.
Enter CIA man Agent Fulbright (Jeff Goldblum) and his partner Agent Fogg (Leo Fitzpatrick, who played Telly in Larry Clark’s Kids), who claim that Henry may have been involved in terrorism and who need Fay to help them retrieve a number of Henry’s journals—purportedly containing sensitive information about the U.S. government—and Fay’s life is overturned and upset, all for a man she claims she never wants to see again.

On the surface, Fay Grim is Hartley’s spin on the Hollywood spy thriller, as a single mother nearly at her wit’s end, is suddenly thrust into the labyrinthine world of spies and double agents, and if it were merely that, it would already have been a triumph.
But Hartley does a lot more in this film, taking us on a journey with Fay, as she travels the world while she finally comes to terms with her real feelings about Henry, a man whose secrets were apparently laid down before everyone to see, secrets that everyone (including his own wife) thought were a whole load of bullsh!t.
In all probability, if I had seen Henry Fool, the conceit of Fay Grim would have astounding resonance, as this is essentially a plot flip, turning everything we thought we knew about Henry from the first film, on its head; all the stories we thought were tall tales, were actually the truth.
As it is though, to a newbie, Fay Grim is still an exceedingly effective film, that is moving and heartfelt (as any good drama is), involving and intriguing (as any good spy thriller is), and funny and witty (as any good comedy is).
Like No Such Thing, it maps an intricate structure over the template of a familiar film genre, and through its characters, imparts subtle truths about relationships, yearning, and human nature.

Posey, being one of the few actresses I know who is able to find honest and genuine emotion in humor, is brilliant in Fay Grim. She’s always been good at portraying a real person amidst the laughter and the witty banter, and she’s in fine form here. And the chemistry she displays with Goldblum (who’s got some pretty tricky lines in this one) is the sort of palpable character interplay that needs to be bottled, mass-produced, and sold off to lesser films with less talented thespians.
Actually, across the board, Hartley’s ensemble acquits itself admirably, and the film, shot in HD with lots of Dutch angles, is all the stronger because of these performances.
Even when the more colorful characters (Elina Lowensohn’s stewardess/topless dancer Bebe and Anatole Taubman’s terrorist Jallal) come into the tale, there is still the underlying sense that we are seeing people here, real characters with real emotions and real lives and real relationships with each other.
Again, as with No Such Thing, no matter how extraordinary things get, we never lose sight of the fact that these are identifiable, sympathetic characters, and Hartley makes this gift to absorb the audience into his world look effortless.

From the sampling of two I have seen of Hartley’s work, I get the impression when someone says “It’s a Hal Hartley film,” it’s kind of like saying “It’s a David Lynch film,” or “It’s a Wes Anderson film,” in that one immediately knows the general characteristics of the film, its shape and the manner in which it treats its characters and the world they move around in, the sort of film where one can see the director’s signature on the frame, can hear his singular voice in the rhythms and nuances of speech.
The sort of film that could never have been directed by anyone else. The sort of film that is the anti-thesis of the work of the new breed of Hollywood director, slick and splashy monstrosities that are ultimately interchangeable with each other, where one is hard-pressed to note just exactly who the director is, and what unique point of view and mindset he brought to the film.
Watching Fay Grim, I could safely say, “Yes, this is by the man who directed No Such Thing.” And when you can make distinctions like that, can spot the qualities and the idiosyncracies, can identify the voice, then you know you’re in the hands of a capable storyteller, and not some hack.
You may not like the story in the end, but at the very least, it’s a story you won’t hear anywhere else.

(Fay Grim OS courtesy of empiremovies.com.)