Sherlock Holmes: New Film Updates Original

Sherlock Holmes is the latest from one of our generation’s primary purveyors of cool, Guy Ritchie (excluding the whole Madonna thing). Ritchie’s films are typical of the contemporary smart-ish action film—a thousand cuts a minute, witty exchanges in lieu of conversations, complete with sort-of-surprise endings. Understandably, many Holmes lovers were apprehensive about ‘Itchy Trigger Finger’ Ritchie adapting the deliberate, cerebral character of Sherlock Holmes to the silver screen. The most recent film version does little to assuage the fears of such Holmes purists, I’m afraid.

The plot of the movie is typical Conan Doyle material, at least thematically. A shadowy nemesis of Holmes, Lord Blackwood, is perpetrating a sinister plot, seemingly with the aid of supernatural forces. But wait, isn’t Holmes a unswerving rationalist?

Conflict! That pretty much covers the plot. That isn’t necessarily a mark against the film, however. Insofar as I can tell, this is true to the core of Doyle’s novels. After all, how many different types of crimes are there to solve? Detective stories are primarily about the person doing the solving.

Fortunately, Robert Downey Jr. does an admirable turn as the lead character, infusing the hero with a physicality lacking in previous iterations while still managing to preserve the double-edged neuroticism of Doyle’s original. Ritchie’s Sherlock is a capable fighter who relies on his wit as much as his reflexes, obsessively analyzing every weakness in his opponent before striking. This approach allows Holmes to be a more contemporary hero, while maintaining his power as primarily intellectual.

Jude Law is also solid as reluctant sidekick Dr. Watson, whose impending marriage has left him even more reluctant than usual. It’s a real testament to his acting abilities that he manages, inasmuch as it is possible, to disguise the fact that he is better-looking than Downey. Had he failed to do this he would have ruined the traditional Holmes/Watson dynamic. I still have no idea how Law pulls this off, and can’t help but feel that it’s the one supernatural occurrence which the movie fails to explain.

The purists I referenced earlier may object to modernizing the character of Holmes, but I feel Doyle himself would have made the same modifications, were he writing now.
The Holmes stories are works of populist fiction, not refined literary diamonds.

Doyle wrote specifically for his audience, and was known to change plot details or even write new novels at the behest of his readers. While it might make some critics feel soothingly intellectual to characterize Guy Ritchie as a dumb-dumb unsuited for the material, a much stronger case can be made for the fact that he is an entertainer in the same vein as Doyle. Both artists work in the primary popular medium of their day, and both seem to have an uncanny knack for providing better-than-average entertainment which the average person can enjoy.

I like to think of Ritchie’s movies as a happy medium between mindless action films and more demanding works of art, mindless entertainment for those of us who don’t actually want mindless entertainment. While the film might not be cerebral, it’s certainly clever (I laughed loudly and often. Sometimes by myself). The movie stays faithful to the surreal and dreary tone of the novels, although the pacing is ratcheted up significantly. The speed of the movie actually compliments the workings of Holmes’ relentless brain, with frequent cuts and all. Sherlock Holmes is, as far as I can tell, a fair extrapolation from the novels.

As an aside, some of my fellow moviegoers have claimed that the plot was a mite predictable. In some sense this is true. It wasn’t terribly difficult to divine how the movie would end. This diminished little of the entertainment value for me, as I’m a firm believer in the journey being the destination. Even if you guess the movie’s ending, you couldn’t possibly guess everything that happens along the way, and those events are of equal importance. Judging movies by the predictability of the last few scenes is only appropriate if the point of the movie is to blindside you, and very few plots aim to do this (should any?).

Putting a few deviations in the plot hardly qualifies as an attempt at a twist ending, and guessing the ending of a movie hardly qualifies you as a narrative sleuth. If anything, it just means that you have a facile understanding of what makes a film good. Most movies and narratives, serious or not, are about what happens along the way. Guess at endings if you will, but don’t make it the standard by which you judge a movie.

Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes is a gripping modernization of a beloved tale which ought to draw a good number of its viewers to the original stories. While the modifications may be too much for some, Ritchie merely updates aspects of the story to make it more accessible to contemporary viewers. Conan Doyle was a populist author, and Sherlock Holmes is a populist cinematic interpretation of his work—and a fair one at that. To hear some critics, you would think Ritchie had turned The Old Man and the Sea into Pirates of the Caribbean. While far from a perfect film, Sherlock Holmes succeeds at what it aims to be: an engaging detective story.