June 15, 2012
GETTING SHERLOCK HOLMES RIGHT
ONSCREEN
Posted by Michael Sragow
If
you click on the special features of the just-released DVD of “Sherlock Holmes:
Game of Shadows,” you’ll find a short tribute to something called
“Holmesavision.” It turns out to be the name given to the director Guy
Ritchie’s method of turning every quasi-Holmesian deduction or confrontation
into an action sequence. Using variable speeds and quick cutting to illustrate
Holmes’s turns of mind twist by twist—usually before the Master commits himself
to an action or solution, but sometimes long afterward—Ritchie makes sure he
won’t leave behind the slowest member of the audience while pretending that
he’s honoring his hero’s greased-lightning illuminations.
These
sequences quickly become annoying and repetitive. Instead of bringing you
inside Holmes’s racing brain and clicking synapses, they simply make his mental
feints as easy to follow as the words in a sing-along. The payoff in Ritchie’s
first Sherlock Holmes movie was supposed to be the adrenaline rush of seeing
Holmes execute a fight strategy or a mental trap exactly as he envisioned it.
The payoff in “Game of Shadows” is meant to be the fun of seeing fate and a
wily adversary toss grit into Holmes’s intellectual cogs, and match his every
calculation.
But even if you buy into Ritchie’s substitution of kinetic thrills
for cumulative mystery and suspense, the film has a been-there, thought-that
feel to it. Robert Downey, Jr., doesn’t completely lose his verve and dash as
Holmes, and Jude Law never overdraws on his air of put-upon gallantry as Dr.
Watson, but the series has romped prematurely into camp. It was easier to take
Downey’s Holmes as a daredevil in the first film—in this one, he comes
perilously close to being an eternal imp. It’s a shame, because Downey, as he
shows even in the boisterous “The Avengers,” has a gift for balancing knowing
patter with big emotions like self-sacrifice. I’ve often thought he’d be a
great Sydney Carton in a new “A Tale of Two Cities.”
The
most worthy item on the “Game of Shadows” disc may be an advertisement for the
second season of “Sherlock,” which came out on DVD two weeks ago. The BBC
series, a string of three ninety-minute films per season, achieves in modern
dress what the Ritchie film attempts in fancy Edwardian costume. It makes
Sherlock Holmes exciting and accessible by finding contemporary analogies to
Arthur Conan Doyle’s conundrums.
The
series employs just as many flashy tricks as Ritchie’s movie, but here they
work for a reason: they mesh with the narrative instead of sticking out from
it. The filmmakers are offhand with their virtuosity, whether they’re printing
text messages on the screen as Sherlock reads them, or chalking in his
observations on top of a man’s suit, or replicating the combination of imagined
details and facts that he sees while he visualizes a crime scene (to the extent
of recreating studio sets in open landscapes). They’re simply keeping us up to
speed with Sherlock (barely), not explaining everything away for us. In this
series’ canny update of “The Hound of the Baskervilles” (it involves chemical
mind control and an espionage agency), the Master tests the theory that will
assuage his own fears and doubts by retreating into a memory plane dubbed “The
Mind Palace.” In a way, half the series is set in Holmes’s mind palace.
“Brainy
is the new sexy” says this series’ Irene Adler (Lara Pulver). It’s an
on-the-nose line that plays exactly right—both because Irene is here a
dominatrix, always manipulating everyone, and because Benedict Cumberbatch’s
sublimely elusive Sherlock shakes it off. Cumberbatch first won wide attention
by playing a rotter in “Atonement” with pitiless intelligence and intensity. After
the first season of “Sherlock,” he was impressive in alternating turns as the
title character and the monster in Danny Boyle’s stage “Frankenstein.” His mad
doctor was spookily cerebral, his monster magnificently primal (and
heartbreaking and lyrical, too).
He’s
perfect for the Sherlock that Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss have created, with
equal cunning and affection. Cumberbatch sometimes plays the hero as a villain,
but mostly for effect. When he denies that he’s a psychopath and tells
reporters that he’s instead a “highly functioning sociopath,” he presents the
press with an image they can lock onto, not an advertisement for himself. What
limits the phenomenally talented Downey from plumbing depths as Sherlock is
that everything in Ritchie’s showy production is extroverted and theatrical.
Even in our much more public era, Cumberbatch’s Sherlock keeps key aspects of
his personality private—except from his partner Watson, and from Irene Adler
and, sadly, the arch-villain Moriarty. For the other half of the series takes
place in what we’d call “the Heart Palace” of Martin Freeman’s Dr. John Watson.
We see the crimes from Sherlock’s perspective, but we see Sherlock from
Watson’s. Freeman’s Watson (like the original, a veteran of a war in
Afghanistan) persuasively embodies Watson’s own appetite for risk-taking. He
creates an intelligent, sometimes puckish, and often questioning foil to
Cumberbatch’s brilliant brand of cheek. Most important, he communicates his
empathy for a man who really does act, sometimes, like a sociopath.
In
the DVD extras for the first season of “Sherlock,” we learn that creators
Moffatt and Gattis consider the best prior adaptations of Conan Doyle to be the
Hollywood movies starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. You can see how right
they are on the “Complete Sherlock Holmes Collection,” containing the fourteen
Sherlock Holmes features that starred Rathbone and defined the Great Detective
for generations.
In
1939, Rathbone and Bruce starred for Twentieth Century Fox in a solid “Hound of
the Baskervilles,” and an even better “Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.” They’re
at full throttle in the latter—a breathless tale of Professor Moriarty’s
attempt to exploit the restlessness of Holmes’s intelligence. The arch-villain
Moriarty (George Zucco) sends the sleuth on a wild-albatross chase while the
evil genius himself schemes to make off with the crown jewels. Rathbone seizes
the chance to celebrate and satirize—simultaneously—Holmes’s peripatetic
brilliance. Bruce’s Watson never makes the Ed McMahon-like error of applauding
Holmes’s cleverness too loudly; he’s more like a genteel Sancho Panza,
suspicious of his pal’s fantastic rationality. The result is everything a
civilized thriller should be: witty, playful, and exciting. And Ida Lupino brings
a hint of sexuality into Holmes’s hermetic universe. She’s refreshingly
fervid—you can feel the heart of a dame beating within the damsel in distress.
After
their stint at Fox, Rathbone and Bruce did a dozen quickies for Universal,
starting in 1942. The set contains beautiful restorations of all twelve. Set in
the nineteen-forties instead of the nineteenth century, they resemble lively,
literate Saturday-matinée serials—but they were the best inspiration of all to
the makers of “Sherlock,” because they brought Homes and Watson into the Second
World War era with confidence and brio.
What
“Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon” shares with the credited Arthur Conan
Doyle source story, “The Adventure of the Dancing Men,” is a code in which the
figures of dancing men in different positions stand for the letters of the
alphabet. “Secret Weapon” surrounds it with an espionage tale about a Swiss
scientist (William Post, Jr.) who invents a sophisticated bombsight and escapes
the Nazis en route to London—only to fall prey to Moriarty (Lionel Atwill).
There are entertaining bursts of deduction, along with a nod to Poe’s “The
Purloined Letter,” and a climax wherein Holmes shrewdly comes up with the
slowest, cruellest way for Moriarty to finish him off—and Moriarty takes him up
on it.
“The
Woman in Green” offers more traditional sleuthing shenanigans in the series’
modern but still fog-shrouded London (actually the backlot at Universal). This
time, Rathbone’s Holmes and Bruce’s Watson crack the mystery of why the corpses
of several young women are found with one finger amputated. Is it the work of a
compulsive serial killer? Or just another dastardly scheme by Moriarty? High
points are the florid banter of the title villainess (a hypnotist played by
Hillary Brooke) and a classic ploy involving the bust of Caesar at 221-B Baker
Street.
The
main reason the Rathbone-Bruce movies endure is the way that they capture the
tinge of romance that Holmes so wisely accused Watson of injecting in his
stories. Rathbone was born to wear Holmes’s cape and deerstalker cap, to smoke
his old brier-root pipe, and to rattle off his ratiocinations with merry
hubris. His perfect wedge of a profile slices through the London fog, and he
uses his imposing brow to signal one idea while his glinting eyes intimate
another. He and Bruce develop a rapport that is sometimes as vaudevillian, but
also as close, as Hope and Crosby’s. At their best, they make you laugh and
cheer.
Photograph: BBC and Hartswood Films Limited.
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