Hope Springs (2012)

Written at the time of the film's release...

Breathe 
or 
Breaking Noses and the Fourth Wall

When Tommy Lee Jones was interviewed on "Inside the Actors Studio" and they got to the point where James Lipton asks "those" questions, and he was asked "What word do you hate?" Jones curled his lip and said "Cute."

Fortunately, he's in Hope Springs, which, unfortunately, is the very definition of "cute," and manages to take some of the smirk out of it and put in the sting. The tale of a pair of "empty-nesters" trying to rekindle the pilot light of their marriage and claw out of their rut, it is merely saved by the stalwart efforts of Jones and Meryl Streep, who say more with their body language—his trudging walk and her nervous, frustrated sighs—than any blunt dialogue could convey.

The script by Vanessa Taylor (she's written for "Everwood," "Alias," "Game of Thrones" and created the short-lived but well-regarded "Jack & Bobby"—quite the gamut, there) is long on touchy-feely aphorisms about metaphors, commitment and getting outside your comfort zone, dispensed by marriage counselor Steve Carell, who cuts out the dangerous aspects of his comedy potential and replaces it with wan smiles and scrutinizing eyes. David Frankel's direction (he directed Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, directed Marley and Me and last year's The Big Year) is safe, but sound (which makes you wonder why he's not directing for The Weinsteins, and he's much more adventurous when working in TV) and keeps things from getting too treacly.

The pressure, then, is on Streep and Jones to bring everything to the table and they're an interesting study in contrasts. She's all invention, imaginatively communicating with extraneous gestures of agitation and nuance, that burst out of her in spurts. Jones is instinctive, making the text real with superb line readings with a minimum of fuss—funny as Jones' character is the fussy one, complaining constantly, passively aggressive, and not offering much in the way of support. Both have issues and neither is entirely blameless—it takes two to make a bad marriage—but the sympathies throughout are with Streep's character, which is hammered home by the director and actress in moments of her satisfaction, by having her look directing at the camera for some sort of conspiratorial communal support from the audience ("Ladies...").

A little of that goes a long, long way,* and exposes that the film is geared to a female audience of a certain age and like-minded sympathies. Such pandering mars the film, taking it out of the situation, and, by acknowledging the intended audience, shatters the illusion of reality, making it a staged presentation. They might as well break into song, if this film about commitment isn't going to commit to anything.

* Too far actually, and in the days after watching the film, the feeling that it recalled for me in a previous film experience is Anthony Perkins smiling directly at the camera at the end of Psycho (There are other straight-on shots in the film—Marion driving, the patrolman, Arbogast—but they're usually looking past the audience, eyes unfocused, not directly at the audience).

It's Complicated

Written at the time of the film's release...

"Karma is the Ultimate Bitch in this One"
or,
If You Can't Stand the Hot-Flash, Get Out of the Kitchen.

It's refreshing to see a movie about a mature couple of advanced age—mine—dealing with post break-up issues. I just wish they weren't being so immature while doing it.

Jane Adler (Meryl Streep) is reaching a transition point in her life—approaching "empty nester" age: her oldest daughter Lauren (Caitlin Fitzgerald) is engaged to Harley (John Krasinski), middle daughter Gabby (Zoe Kazan) is moving out of the house, and youngest, Luke (Hunter Parrish) is graduating from college. Her ex-husband Jake (Alec Baldwin) is now married to young "Ms. Thang" Agness (Lake Bell), with an inherited son (from her last affair), Pedro (Emjay Anthony). She has decided that she's going to expand her nest...er, house so she can have "the kitchen she's always dreamed of;" she runs a salonish bakery, and she can cook (second movie this year—Julie & Julia from Nora Ephron, this one from Nancy Meyers, both of whom seem to be trying to keep Streep in the kitchen).
Youngest son's graduation pulls the whole family together in New York, with Jake "flying solo" due to family illness. Once there, the two old marrieds hook up, and once Jane is tanked, there occurs a "once more for old times' sake" canoodling that leaves him satisfied and her vomiting.

Most guys would take that as a sign, but not Jake. Soon, he's spending too much time at Jane's, telling his ex-wife that his current wife doesn't understand him, and while it may seem like sweet revenge for Jane, she's also creeped out by it, so much so that she won't tell the kids, and allows it to interfere with a budding romance with her architect (Steve Martin). Now, maybe I've been watching too many "Nature" shows on elephants lately, but I could have used David Attenborough to explain this mating ritual to me.

Maybe it's that Martin and Baldwin are playing the roles the other should have taken: Martin's love interest is a deferential, shell-shocked divorcee with a manner that reminded me of Charlie Ruggles, and Baldwin's in full pursed lips obnoxious priss mode (without the "30 Rock" irony) that makes his character not so much funny as alarming. And Streep, consummate pro that she is, works the material for all its worth, fluttering and kvelling and kvetching, making Jane seem two pastries shy of a brunch. There are times when there seems to be some acknowledgment of time—Jane is constantly fanning herself, as if caught in a hot-flash, but the next instant she's giggling like Juno.

The one guy who seems to be doing something interesting is John Krasinski, as the not-yet husband who finds he's baby-sitting his future in-laws, and is the only one who seems to rise above the material to be doing something interesting—interesting and funny. As the only fully-informed character in the cast, he manages to convey the screwball nature of the situation, acting as the surrogate audience, eyes widening with each embarrassing compromise. He makes Meyers the director—with her sledge-hammer reaction shots and uneven pacing seem far more successful than she is.

The Iron Lady

I recently was pulled into a "Meryl Streep Draft" where, like sports brackets, the participants picked what they thought would be the best collection of movies featuring Meryl Streep to win the competition. Weird what film enthusiasts do.

If you want to listen to the podcast where they were selected, it is here.

If you want to vote for me, the ballot is here. If I lose, voting machines will be seized.

Curiously, I did not pick The Iron Lady—I don't think any of us did—although it is Streep's usual competent display (and she won an Oscar—that counts for...something).

Written at the time of the film's release.

 

Keeping Up Appearances

or

"Don't Want to Dig Around Too Much, M'. You Don't Know What You Might Find."

The Weinstein's last bid in 2011 to win an audience of Anglophiles seems a trifle desperate and might be a bit too early to give the subject proper justice, like Oliver Stone's Nixon or W.—we're still too close to the Thatcher years to have any sort of perspective, other than a cursory glance at the events that shaped the Conservative years of the '80's. What damage was done, what was gained, is still unknowable, especially given the subsequent Blair years and how British-American relationships changed and coalesced. We get highlights and lowlights, but no illumination, and, instead, we get a look-back, not unlike Nixon's drunken reverie, but this time filtered through Maggie's Alzheimic reflections, with the dementia-figure of her dead husband Denis' presence as a Iago-like devil's advocate (played by Jim Broadbent, in just the way you think he would, a little dotty, but with a puckish edge). Really, both of them deserve a little better, no matter what one thinks of the politics.

But, the Alzheimer's is a good tool if someone wants to do a hatchet-job.  The disease brings the past into crystal clarity (for the afflicted, not for the story-teller), while also undercutting the reliability of the narrator in the present day.  Hardly seems fair, as the two women who wrote and directed The Iron Lady (Abi Morgan and Phyllida Lloyd) do seem sincere about presenting the hurdles that Thatcher had to overcome in her ambition to seek change, achieve office, and, in becoming a political animal, save her party and become PM. The role could have easily gone into caricature, were it not for Thatcher's best supporter in the film, Meryl Streep.

The role ultimately won LaStreep another Oscar (and, say what you will about the "unfairness of it all," she does deserve it—this is an amazing performance) and it contains her hallmark studied approach with the same intricate nuances she brings to every role—the rock-solid accent, the filigreed gestures, the interesting way she fills up the pauses and held-shots with interesting choices that are unexpected, but deeply felt. In the elderly sections, she doesn't quite have the "thousand-yard-stare" I've seen in Alzheimer's patients, but the frailties are there, right down to the quaking-arms-under-pressure and the processing pauses that flash through without making a big deal of them. Streep's always good, good enough that one might take her for granted, but this one's practically a one-woman show and certainly the best thing in a film that's "too little-too soon."

Don't Look Up (2021)

Deep Impact on a Shallow Planet

or

The Dinosaurs Couldn't Say 'Told Ya So..."

 

A recent article in The Atlantic says that there are 21 million Americans who have no relationship to reality, wanting to re-instate Donald Trump as President of the United States, citing sheisters, Alzheimic Air Force Generals, and bad math to support their contentions. There's a bunch of Gen Z's who think birds are fake (they should get together with the folks who worry about chem-trails—there must be a connection because they're both in the AIR!) And we've always had Flat-Earthers because they've never been in a plane and figured out why the shortest distance to get to anywhere is not over the pole.

 

But, ask a farmer about global warming and they get serious.  Or a gardener. They've seen the time-shifts. They've seen annuals sprout too early. Crops lose their "window" and you compensate by shifting the planting earlier, risking the prospect of freezing. They know. You can't count on the Earth anymore. You can't count on anything...except maybe on one hand the number of friends you have that actually might be sane.

 

It used to be "If You Don't Stand For Something, You'll Fall for Anything." Now, with the internet the harder you stand, you'll fall even harder.

So, with that little sanctimony out of the way...what's the scoop on Don't Look Up, Adam McKay's look at "problem-solving" in a modern "connected" world?

 

McKay's conceit is to look at the "climate change" debate in a metaphorical way—what if we knew an "extinction-level" sized body was going to hit the Earth and we couldn't depend on our leaders, political or business, to save us for any reason?

Michigan State doctoral candidate Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) is spending a quiet night at an observatory studying trace gasses in dead galaxies for Astronomy Professor Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) when she sees something weird on the screen. It's a comet...and it's moving. Mindy is called and he and his grad students celebrate what will be the Dibiasky Comet, and start working the orbital path...when Mindy starts to get nervous and tells all the other students to go home. Except for Kate. She sees what he saw: that the comet is heading for Earth. It's 5-6 km long and it will hit Earth in 6 months and 14 days. Call it 26 weeks.

They call NASA, who conference calls them in with Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan) of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office. The link says it's real. And shit just got real; Oglethorpe mutters "that's a big boy" and then goes quiet when he realizes it signals "an extinction-level event." And while NASA advises caution, Oglethorpe orders a plane to bring Mindy and Dibiasky to the White House to tell the President. Dibiasky sees the Oval Office through an open door and grabs Mindy: "Are we really about to tell the President of the United States that we have just over six months until humankind—basically every species—is completely extinct?" Getting a shaky affirmative, she promptly throws up in an executive waste-basket. 

They're kept waiting for seven hours because the Executive Branch is in crisis mode: their nominee for Supreme Court justice has been revealed to be a pervert. Coming back the next day, they're given 20 minutes to explain what's going on and it doesn't go well: Mindy is nervously hyperventilating and that's off-putting to the coke-head Chief of Staff (Jonah Hill), who got the job because he's the President's son. The President (Meryl Streep) is a hot mess, unable to focus on the potential disaster for need of a smoke, and saying that the timing of this "is atrocious" (mid-terms). She cuts to the chase: "What's the 'ask' here?" "Save us" is the reply. The decision is made to have "her people" look into it and "Sit tight and assess."

The three scientists can't believe it—they only have six months—so, they decide to take it to the press, the Washington Herald, who sets up a segment on it at the end of "The Daily Rip" (hosted by shiny anchors played by Tyler Perry and Cate Blanchett) after a segment on the disasterous Supreme Court pick and then on the break-up of two "important" pop stars (Ariana Grande and Scott Mescudi). Warned that they don't have "media training" Dibiasky and Mindy have trouble negotiating the happy banter of the hosts until Dibiasky cracks and melts down on-camera: "Are we not being clear? Maybe the destruction of the entire planet isn't supposed to be FUN! Maybe it's supposed to be terrifying." The hosts are affronted. That's just bad form. And bad television. Dibiasky becomes a snarky meme, and interest in the Herald's story on the internet drops like a comet from the sky. So, they stop covering it.

But, because they've gone on national TV with national secrets Dibiasky and Mindy are arrested by the FBI, and the White House has to scramble. President Orlean goes on television in an elaborately staged event on a naval vessel to announce an emergency spending bill to launch a space mission to try and blow up the comet—a space mission that is manned by a single astronaut (Ron Perlman) because "Washington needs a hero." All well and good until a cell-phone/tech pioneer, Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance), is told by his team that the comet is a source of Earth-depleted minerals that are critical for making cell-phones. The mission is scrubbed—he's a big donor to the President's campaign—and another mission is planned to break up the comet and have it's pieces fall into the Pacific so they can be recovered and resourced.

One sees the point: nobody is going to do anything about it while there's time enough for people to figure out a way to make money from it, because that's the only "killing" they're concerned about. If there was a way to take carbon out of the atmosphere that wasn't deemed fiscally expensive and would make a fortune, we'd be worrying, instead, that there was too much ice at the poles, rather than selling our waterfront property. Don't Look Up merely converts that to the disaster scenario of Armageddon—at times the movie looks like Michael Bay's "this would look great in a car commercial" style of film-making—or Deep Impact.

The satire veers all over the place, sometimes sharp (of course people wouldn't believe it until they saw it with their own eyes, and, of course, a television chat show would cock up such news and, of course, a screaming fit on-air is going to be dismissed and the stuff of internet jokes) and heavy-handed (the political stuff is baldly aimed at the last administration, with the difference being that the Orlean team look a bit more competent and decisive). It falls somewhere between Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy smart and Tropic Thunder dumb without ever achieving Dr. Strangelove brilliance. One grimly concedes McKay's aiming for the fences but he sometimes gets distracted by his own gee-wizardry and sarcastic weltschmerz to score a home-run.

Some of it is performance issues: Perry and Blanchett are rather one-note, but that seems appropriate for chat hosts. Hill's performance is as obnoxious as it's supposed to be, but Streep wears her tweet-hurt a bit too far, although it is reminiscent of Sarah Palin-subtlety. DiCaprio tries to achieve his Wolf of Wall Street comedic heights at times and falls short, but impresses in his dramatic scenes. Lawrence is terrific as the audience stand-in for expressing incomprehension and Rob Morgan stays out of comedy territory completely and frequently becomes a life-raft of reason. Best of all is Mark Rylance, who makes his tech entrepreneur suggestive but not an imitation, with just the right touch of Asperger's, child-like wonder, and child-like malice.

The reviews for Don't Look Up have been horrible, accusing McKay of condescension and being supercilious—social critics usually are—and there's a whiff of that here. But, there's also an earnestness that his heart is in the right place, if slightly broken, railing like a mad prophet to an ignoring, apathetic crowd. Despite the brickbats, I found myself enjoying it much more than I suspected I would, recognizing its weaknesses but appreciating the strengths.  

Now, about the message. Maybe by clothing "climate change" in a more direct disaster scenario is too subtle. There is a scene in the last season of "The Newsroom" ("Main Justice" Season 3 Episode 3) where there's an interview with a scientist from the EPA who has been prevented from issuing an alarming report about the environment (involving CO2 levels measured in Hawaii), and when asked to sum up the findings replies "a person has already been born who will die due to catastrophic failure of the planet" The anchor is taken aback and tries to walk it back to a less alarming conclusion, "Let's see if we can find a better spin...people are starting their weekends."

 

There isn't one. The only counter-argument is denial and that's just deflection and a stall to action. And we're doomed anyway. It's funny and it's a gut-punch. A sick joke that punches right in the nose.

 

On the much grander scale of things—pale blue dot-wise—cosmic catastrophes happen all the time—we just haven't heard about it since we haven't gotten television from there (yet)...because it's a messy Universe, despite all the space. We postulate the supernovas, the gravity collisions, but cannot grasp the implications, like imagining what happens to an ant colony when developing condo's. But, think of it in the "if Helen Keller fell down in a forest, would she make a sound" kind of way: "What if there was a cataclysmic event, and nobody did anything about it?"

 

The cosmic punch-line is "They deserved their fate."

Lions for Lambs

Written at the time of the film's release...

"Never engage the enemy for too long, or he will adapt to your tactics"

Carl Von Clausewitz

 

There are three arenas in play, and as the film begins the protagonists are checking their ledgers and statistics: Lt. Col. Falco (Peter Berg) is checking his strategy briefings; Senator Jasper Irving (Tom Cruise) is looking at dropping poll numbers; Professor Steven Malley (Robert Redford) is checking the quarter's attendance; Reporter Janine Roth (Meryl Streep) is looking at her unopened note-book--an empty slate. Thus begins Lions for Lambs* a polemic about the current Middle-East War, the entities that package and sell it, and the public that may not like it, but won't do anything to oppose it. All the stories intersect a bit and the movie takes place over a few hours. The script is by Matthew Michael Carnehan, who also wrote The Kingdom. Its director, Peter Berg, who plays Falco here, said that film was "98% Action, 2% Message." Here, that ratio is reversed, and, man, is it tedious. 

First off, there is a heavy veneer of liberal self-satisfaction (though not as much as when conservatives put the hammer down). The senator is a Republican tyro, trying to bolster his party's (and his) poll numbers by setting up a new front in Afghanistan (Senator's can do that? I mean besides Charlie Wilson?) He's given Roth a solid hour (this is supposedly a big deal) to argue his case that this attack (no, really, this one!) will win the war in Afghanistan, the war on terror, the hearts and minds of Afghans (he really says this) and presumably bring the troops back home for Christmas (he doesn't say this, but he might as well have). Cruise was bio-engineered for this role (and you just know this is the part Redford would have taken during his career in the cynical 1960's), an opportunistic-photo-op-ready politico, with flags on the desk, pants-press in the office, and flashing Chiclets in his mouth, while Meryl Streep is all shambling messiness, trying to counter the arguments (is that her job?) that Cruise spins on the head of a pin. Their section is the sort of "greased-pig" argument and obfuscation bull-session that keeps me from watching the "pundit" shows--nothing's less fun or informative than watching two used-policy salesmen, hectoring each other trying to get their feet stuck in the open door of your mind. Finally it gets down to my favorite argument when rats-on-their-hind-legs are cornered--The Multiple Choice Bottom-Liner: "Do you want to win the War on Terror: Yes or No?". ("Well, I don't know, Senator, when did you stop beating your wife?") At one point Streep asks, "When does the new offensive start?" Cruise looks at his (supposed) Rolex. "Ten minutes ago." So much for pre-selling.

And in that ten minutes, the mission is already SNAFU'd, when two grunts are bounced out of a helicopter taking heavy fire, turning the offensive thrust into a rescue mission. Not a good start to winning those hearts and minds.

And by a curious coincidence--or a heavy-handed ploy by the screenwriter--those very two soldiers were both students in Professor Malley's political science class, who, in a school project capped their volunteerism argument by enlisting. Now, Malley uses them to guilt a slacker-student who can't be bothered coming to class because he's "busy with stuff," into considering a more activist stance before the bigger challenges of jobs, mortgages, ball-games, and watching "American Idol" zombies away any chance of him doing any critical thinking for the rest of his life. That's a valid argument to make, whichever side of the aisle you take bribes on. But instead of making the arguments, Malley turns them into three-corner shots that kind of dance around the problem, rather than saying something, oh, like "I would suggest you start coming to class or I will flunk your lazy frat-ass: your call."

The trouble here is that the issues are so immediate that the arguments the film is making were too late four years ago. So, it's a bit like soft-ball preaching to the choir. The arguments are sound, but they have very little relevance to extricating us from the tar-pit of this conflict, and, yes, people are getting chewed up by it, but that's the business of war, and why you try to avoid it, rather than rush in like a damned fool. It's great to be able to say all this with 20-20 hind-smugness, but it's essentially useless. Now tell us something we don't know, and how we can avoid it the next time. "Is he failing you?" a fellow frat asks the student about his meeting. The movie certainly is.

* The title derives from a phrase from World War I, but, the exact nature of the quote is subject to debate, and its history, like the film, is a bit muddled.

Doubt

"Waiting for Sister Aloysius"

I'm a recovering Catholic who finally walked out the stained-glass double doors after the pedophile priest racket was revealed. My faith had been shaken before, back when I was a kid and couldn't reconcile all those souls condemned to Purgatory for eating meat on Fridays, when we, the living, were freed of forced fish-stick consumption after Vatican II. But the pedophile priests was like sprinkling Holy Water on a vampire for me. That the Church hierarchy would shuffle child molesters within the system to keep the offenses quiet exposed the rottenness of the Church hierarchy right up to the Pontiff. That those priests would take the Authority of the Church, and people's Faith and the trust their flock had instilled in them, and betray it for their predatory ends...well, Jesus wept. Probably tears of blood.

So, here comes Doubt, the film version of John Patrick Shanley's Tony and Pulitzer Prize winning play (Shanley wrote Five Corners, and Moonstruck and directed the surreal and neglected Joe Versus the Volcano*) In it, knuckle-rapping Catholic School principal Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Meryl Streep) confronts Vatican II subscriber Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) over her suspicions about his dealings with his students. It seems Sister James (Amy Adams, maybe a bit too sweet) has suspicions about Flynn after one of her students (Joseph Foster) returns from a rectory visit "acting strangely." Sister Aloysius already thinks Flynn's a bit lax in his philosophies, and she begins actively campaigning for his ouster—a dangerous position for her to take as all the nuns are subordinates to the priests. Still, she clings to whatever control she can and exploits the fear she inspires in her students to her ends, which justifies her mean-spiritedness.

It's one of those plays that makes you want to act. The parts are juicy and can be played any number of ways, and the cast is always on top of their roles: Streep, is all pinched-nerve as Aloysius, and obviously relishes the power of the role (probably as much as Aloysius does); Hoffman is a cypher, betraying as little emotion as he can (when it's not to his advantage) until he's braying at the top of his lungs (when he and Streep finally take the gloves off, it's almost too much, the tension building to it has been so intense). They're great, but Viola Davis quietly, resignedly breaks your heart as the mother who wants the best for her son, whatever it takes.

If I have a complaint with the movie it's that there's a bit too much weather happening in the background that comments directly to the matters on-screen. It's gilding the lily meteorologically to have implied threats accompanied by thunder, heated discussions thrummed by the rattling of a downpour and the conflicts of conscience buttressed by a leaf-filled wind-gust. One expects the choir from The Color Purple to come marching down the street singing "Looks Like God's Trying to Tell You Something." Shanley has had enough experience directing; he should know when they talk about "opening up" a play they're not talking about the Heavens. His background choices are too "on the nose"—like having a radio playing just the right song to reinforce the obvious. God is supposed to work in mysterious ways.

After it's debut, Shanley changed the name of the play to "Doubt: a Parable," which is essentially true as it's a story about humans that teaches a religious principal. And the implications, shifts, and nuances are so rich and subject to interpretation that the one-act play invariably becomes two acts with the debate it inspires in the audience.** What is Faith? What is Devotion? Can a rigorous belief sustain itself when the very text of it changes and the institution that inspires it betrays it? And what does that say of the Institution that compromises its own teachings?

Doubt does not imply complacency. But Doubt does.

* He also wrote the screenplays for Alive and Congo, but the less said about them the better.

** It happened as soon as the credits started in the theater where I saw it--"Did I miss something?" said the woman in front of me to her husband. I casually told her what she hadn't considered, and she and her husband looked at me in shock. "Oh my God!" she said, and that started a lively discussion between my row and their row about who was right and the implications. I'm starting to fall in love with this theater, where the audiences are so engaged.

Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events

Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (Brad Silberling, 2004) O-kayyy. So far, for Hallowe'en on this site we've featured apocalyptic religious cults, invisible men, sadistic versions of "Big Brother" and lots and lots of creepy things. I'd like to say the best is yet to come, but, no. Things are going to get worse. Much, much worse...to the point, where I have a true sense of dread about what's coming up—not just in the posting, but in the very writing of it. Dear, dear me. Oh, it's going to be awful...simply awful. Really, people should have better things to do than to make movies like the ones I'll be considering in the next couple of weeks. 

But (sigh) it is Hallowe'en Season. And one must simply get this stuff out of our systems, so that we can vote with clear consciences, and think of our fellow citizens and how they are coping with a pandemic, and social distancing, and wearing masks, and interviews from the census by bright ardent people who are only doing the right thing, as well as the intricacies of working at home while also supervising the on-line education of our precious dutiful children.

But in the warm comfort of the domicile, many flights of stairs from the garret in which this is written, the Hallowe'en movie of choice is this (to be heretofore crunched to Unfortunate Events to avoid a cramp). It might be the best movie Barry Sonnenfeld never made. It has his insensibility, his florid camera moves,* snappy editing, austere framing and live-action cartoonish gambits (lots of shots of peoples' faces gaping into the camera).

But, it didn't have enough budget and so Brad Silberling took over the project.

Silberling is a chameleonic director; he tends to take on the characteristics of whatever project falls into his lap—handy for his long tenure as a television director of such idiosyncratic shows as "NYPD Blue," but making him hard to pin down as a feature director. How do you explain the disparity between Unfortunate Events and his unfortunate City of Angels? Before you attempt that, let me trump it by adding the even more unfortunate Will Ferrell vehicle, Land of the Lost.

So, it's perhaps fortunate for Silberling that so much of "Unfortunate Events" depends on others. The Lemony Snicket-styled writing—a bit like "Miss Manners" without her morning pick-me-up—of dark, despairing fore-shadowing** inspires a switch-back Rankin-Bass-styled opening that comes crashing to a halt. ("This would be an excellent time to walk out of the theater, living room, or airplane where this film is being shown." says the Lemony Narrator, as read by Jude Law)

"Fade to Black" is the more appropriate phrase. Fade to monochromatic gothic steam-punk macabre, (which permeates the film, like a lighter version of "The Addams Family") as the film takes up the sad misfortunes of the Beaudelaire orphans: Violet, a voracious inventor (Emily Browning); Klaus, a voracious reader (Liam Aiken); and Sunny, a voracious biter (Kara Hoffman and Shelby Hoffman). When their parents are killed in a mysterious fire, the Estate (executed by a piggish Timothy Spall), the kids are shipped off to the cunning clutches of Count Olaf (Jim Carrey), a despicable actor who only cares for the Beaudelaire fortune. Treated as servants by the fiend, he decides to kill them off when it's determined that he'll only get the money when they're adults. And so he leaves them, locked in a car on a rail-road track with the 11:15 barreling down on them.

What to do, what to do?

Based on the first three "Unfortunate Events" books ("The Bad Beginning," "The Reptile Room," and "The Wide Window,"***), the film is as episodic as could be with the child-endangering machinations of the Count the single unsavory thread running through it. 

Upon Carrey's every entrance, Silberling takes the wise course of just hanging back, giving Carrey a wide shot (with distorting anamorphic lens) and keeping any other actor out of giggling range. So much of his performance is ad-libbed, you could make the case that it's Carrey who's driving the bus; things calm down considerably when Billy Connolly and Meryl Streep take possession of the children (and the movie), but gears up again when Carrey dervishes his way into the scene (Connolly stays out of his way, but Streep engages him, going eye-to-eye).

It's a good thing, too. "Unfortunate Events" could have turned excessively mordant to the point of leeching all the fun out of it, production-designed into stasis if Carrey wasn't there to break windows (and characters) in the proceedings. In that spirit, the cast is rounded out by such anarchic spirits as Catherine O'Hara, Jennifer Coolidge, Cedric the Entertainer, Dustin Hoffman, Jane Lynch, and Craig Ferguson that flit around the corners to keep things from getting too predictable, and deservedly more than a little off-kilter.

* He started out as the Coen Brothers' cinematographer.

** It's fun when doled out in tea-spoons of dread and low dudgeon, but if you want to hear it overdone, listen to the director and author Daniel Handler's commentary track on the DVD. Handler (as "Lemony Snicket") acts like your staid Aunt Petunia, who goes all-fluttery and horrified at the movie, which is funny for ten minutes, then overstays its welcome...by two hours. 

*** Dear reader, do be careful when going to these links, for it appears this Lemony Snicket character wants your e-mail address. The cad. I would be cautious. Very, very cautious.