You leave through the back door.
Nearby is the TRANSFORMER which distributes electricity from the UNDERGROUND GENERATOR powered by the river flowing beneath your house.
The transformer was struck by lightning though, and no longer works. You wonder if your mother has any plans to have it fixed. You guess she'd rather just play her mind games in a dark house like a weirdo.
You can see the MAUSOLEUM and the PORTABLE GENERATOR across your back yard. You're almost there.
Slackin’ with the Sleuth: Reviewing Netflix’s “A Series of Unfortunate Events”
As much as we like to pontificate over bad page-to-screen adaptations, the idea of involving the original author in the delicate process of translating literature to film language is not as fullproof as one might think. Does said author even understand what made his book work? Not necessarily. Would a novelist know what makes a good movie tick? Rarely, if ever.
But when a second adaptation of “A Series Of Unfortunate Events” came along, and when Daniel Handler became part of its writing team, fans across the globe allowed themselves a faint breath of optimism. Daniel had written no less than two original movie scripts before (Rick and Kill the poor), and his unfortunate experience on the first adaptation had given him a testing round, so to speak: this time, he would know what worked and what didn’t. With the last book in the series published over a decade ago, he even had a chance to, perhaps, improve and revise the source material.
The end result is aggravating, baffling, conceited, dreadful, exasperating, flacid, grim, horrifying, irritating, jittery, klutzy, long-winded, malicious, nerve-wracking, ostentatious, petty, querulous, rash, sinister, tepid, unrefined, vapid, wasteful, xylophone, yamn-inducing, zonked — and probably the best thing you’ll watch this year.
This is the adaptation “A Series Of Unfortunate Events” truly deserved, one which in all likelihood should never have come out of the Hollywood system. As far as adaptations of longer series go, the quality and faithfulness of the restitution is on par with Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings”. Everything which made the books brillant and unique has been carefully recreated. The directors clearly gave a lot of thought as to how they were going to translate that into a cinelatic language. The series is essentially a parody/deconstruction of literary tropes: the adaptation should therefore not just adapt a plot, but also replace specific children’s books’ cues with specific children’s movies’ cues. The 2004 movie had some fun with that, but the Netflix series really takes it to a whole new level.
On that note, Neil Patrick Harris’ interpretation isn’t actually that different from Carrey’s vision. The main difference between the two lies in a stronger script and a better understanding of Olaf’s thematical role in the narrative. N.P.H. plays Olaf as a personification of the unbridled Id: the worst of humanity, with all moral barriers long removed. This is a more “grounded” Olaf who simply enjoys testing his power and the gullibility of his victims. He doesn’t try very hard, because he genuinely enjoys how easy fooling people can be. This is what separates him from Carrey’s interpretation: his Captain Sham and Stephano were simply too... good. His outlandish Olaf seemed to live on another plane of existence: the influence of outworldly characters such as Beetlejuice was obvious. He felt out of touch with the reality of the other characters, going as far as mimicking a dinosaur for no apparent reason. NPH’s Olaf, on the other hand, frequently breaks character and only acts when he strictly needs to. Carrey also made his character too sympathetic, as Olaf looked like a flamboyant hedonist who would be genuinely fun to be around. Meanwhile NPH is a tyrant to his minions: they’re only safe from his ire as long as they help him make other people miserable. These small differences from scene to scene pay off magnificently and NPH’s interpretation slowly but surely emerges as the clear victor.
Many of the dialogs were taken verbatim from the books. This is actually a pretty wordy script, with rapid back-and-forth exchanges and witty banter. No appeal to realism there. This perfectly fits the series’ atmosphere, but an unfortunate number of lines tend to reiterate information the viewers have already seen or heard. These types of expository redudancies show up a lot in the books as well, but that doesn’t mean they should have been recreated.
But the greatest disappointment is the direction’s incapacity to add tension to key upsetting scenes. It’s a credit to Handler’s skills as a writer that many of his readers, right until “The End”, believed he could truly kill off one or several of the Baudelaire orphans. The books were set in an absurd, zanier version of our world, but the stakes felt just as real. Action scenes and dramatric moments could get genuinely chilling and heartbreaking at times.
This is where the adaptation starts to show serious flaws: suspenseful and impactful scenes get muted, or, worse, ruined by the profusion of jokes. Jim Carrey has often been accused of overshadowing the rest of the cast with his antics, but in this more recent retelling, every single actor on screen is a large ham. The books could get away with a lot more jokes because the reader was in complete control of the pacing: a darker event could “sink in” easily, for as long as it was needed. In a cinematic format, everything happens much more quickly and the proper timing is lost.
The worst offender is probably the destruction of Josephine Anwhistle’s house. Brad Silberling filmed it as an horror scene, from the point of view of three children trapped in a hurricane. Sonnenfeld’s version challenges description, falling somewhere between a Yakety Sax sequence and a Tex Avery cartoon. The sequence is not added for chills, but for the amusement of the viewer and the indulgence of the director. And if you thought Josephine’s eventual demise got the short end of the stick in the 2004 version, her end is actually treated as an afterthought in the TV series, with an even briefer emotional pay-off. There are other missed opportunities of such caliber, but these two stand out the most.
Perhaps in to an effort to make it more reassuring to concerned parents, the direction seems to have made a deliberate choice not to emphasize danger and stress whenever possible. A lot of energy gets lost in the process and this may be the one aspect of the books’ narration that the Netflix adaptation was not able to recreate. The opening credits implore us to “look away”, but the direction makes an effort to make everything feel “safer”. Most of the sets look like they were taken out of a pastel toyshop.
Another pride the 2004 movie can keep is Thomas Newman’s versatile music, which veered from classical to more environmental orchestrations. His expansive soundtrack is still universally beloved and managed to give every scene the proper ambiance while keeping a number of relevant leitmotivs. Meanwhile, the TV series sticks to its accordion pieces with the nightmarish obsession of a Bedlam inmate. The themes chosen for a number of key plotpoints are just plain wrong and add up to the loss of tension we highlighted above. In the first episode, Sunny encourages her siblings by banging two pots together while babbling a repetitive song of her own. Putting her in charge of the series’ composing might have been a mercy: the final cacophony is enough to make you hate Klezmer.
We’ve been pretty negative in our review so far, but only because these are the aspects which warrant discussion. The plot has been beefed up to the satisfaction and relief of everyone, and the netflix-specific expansions are sure to garner some love. The surprise plotwist near the end of the series is a stroke of evil genius. Justice Strauss’ character, in particular, is much more developed than her book counterpart and leaves on a heartbreaking note.
The old-time fans will enjoy the constant homages and clever reinterpretations of the books’ finer plot points, and the newcomers will quickly warm up to the unrefrained creativity and surprizingly effective emotions of it all. This show is aware and unafraid of its own originality, and doesn’t look down on its audience, most specifically its younger audience.
So far, the only unfortunate thing about the entire affair is the way it elevates our standards when it comes to children’s literature’ adaptations.
