A no-shit Sherlock
<p>Instapundit and John Nolte are quite right: the new Sherlock Holmes movie <em>was</em> better than we had a right to expect from the trailers.  We were led to anticipate a fun, mindless action comedy &#8211; a sort of reprise of <cite>Iron Man</cite> in Victorian drag, with Robert Downey Jr. in full scenery-chewing mode.</p>
<p>I would have enjoyed watching that movie just fine, thank you.  I&#8217;ve read the entire Holmes canon, but I don&#8217;t worship it any more than Arthur Conan Doyle did, and having Guy Ritchie reprocess it into a mere popcorn flick wouldn&#8217;t particularly have bothered me.  But&#8230;to my pleased surprise, Ritchie aimed for &mdash; and achieved &mdash;  something much better.</p>
<p><span id="more-1547"></span></p>
<p>Let&#8217;s get the negatives out of the way first.  The script was heavyhanded and stupid in spots, though no worse than par for an action movie and light-years better than the crap James Cameron was shoveling in <cite>Avatar</cite>. Rachel McAdams was, as another reviewer noted, only poorly integrated into the main plotline.   Ritchie overdid the sepia-and-grime thing a bit in the cinematogaphy. And there was barely a line of the villain&#8217;s dialogue you couldn&#8217;t see coming.</p>
<p>Still. These are minor defects compared to what the movie gets right, and how it challenges Holmesians to rethink their comfortable and somewhat stultified image of the great detective.</p>
<p>This movie goes back to canon and presents Doyle&#8217;s original Holmes from a different angle than the Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett performances.  The Holmes we have become used to from later interpretations is sort of Holmes-as-Vulcan, the Mr. Spock of the gaslight era; cool, cerebral, controlled, a bit disdainful.  Forgotten in the Holmes-as-Vulcan version is that the original Holmes was an eccentric drug addict who went to pieces in the absence of a degree of mental stimulation ordinary life could not afford him.  Also forgotten is that he was written as a man of tremendous physical energy, a boxer and martial artist who relished describing his victory in a brawl (<cite>The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist</cite>). </p>
<p>I would bet serious money that Robert Downey Jr. read the entire canon, or at least most of it, in preparing for this role. I would bet more serious money that Ritchie gave him wide interpretive latitude and that some of the best lines in the film were ad-libbed from deep within character.  Because Downey&#8217;s performance is <em>right</em>. It is truthful to the original in a way that the Holmes-as-Vulcan version could not be.</p>
<p>This was not, as in <cite>Iron Man</cite>, the actor drawing a thin layer of Tony Stark over his own personality and mugging outrageously at a camera we are at all times fully aware of; it is the actor fully inhabiting the character and, for all the surface showiness of the action, portraying that character with craft and subtlety and restraint.  Downey demonstrates that he can <em>act</em>.</p>
<p>All the positive reviews have noted, correctly, that Jude Law&#8217;s Watson is a tremendous asset to the film.  As important as his own performance was that he enabled Holmes to <em>be</em> Holmes. The repartee and occasional friction between them propels the film as effectively as its plot.  I want to also note that Kelly Reilly, as Watson&#8217;s intended, steals a couple of scenes not with her fragile physical beauty but with a steely mental toughness rather at odds with it. </p>
<p>The negative reviews have been entertaining.  Predictably, the <em>New York Times</em> reviewer sneered at the movie, dismissing it as &#8220;laddish&#8221;. The common objection from the naysayers seemed to be basically that Downey was somehow desecrating the canon by playing against the Holmes-as-Vulcan version of the character.  </p>
<p>I say that&#8217;s effete pseudo-intellectual snobbery and I say the hell with it.  This movie wasn&#8217;t perfect, but it was far truer to its source than a lot of Holmes fans are apparently willing or even able to admit.  I look forward to a sequel.</p>
