[ back ]
Action-adventure Holmes doesn’t ring true for longtime fan
(by David Linzee - December 23, 2009)
I’ve been a fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories since I was 12, and recently friends have been sending anxious e-mails, asking how I’m bearing up in the final days before the new movie Sherlock Holmes is unleashed to stomp through the nation’s multiplexes. It was produced by Joel Silver, the man who gave us The Matrix and its sequels and Die Hard and its sequels. So we know what to expect.
I’m still reeling from the trailer — a torrent of bad jokes, brutal violence, hints of a standard clock-ticking-down- to-doomsday plot and glimpses of a computer-generated Victorian London that completes the film’s resemblance to a video game.
Still, I think I will survive, and I know Holmes and Watson will. As two of the most popular characters in fiction, they have endured plenty of numbskull adaptations.
Many of the movie’s bad ideas are not new. William Gillette, who adapted Holmes for the stage in 1899, decided that a celibate hero wouldn’t do and gave him a love interest. So there’s precedent for the role played by Rachel McAdams in the movie, though her penchant for appearing in varying states of undress would not have worked in 1899.
Similarly, boxing and stick-fighting aren’t novel activities for Holmes. Arthur Conan Doyle himself described his hero as a master of hand-to-hand combat, though he made the fights occur off-stage. The movie, naturally, is not so discreet.
One of the movie’s ideas isn’t even all that bad: having Jude Law play Dr. Watson. Movie-makers have traditionally given the role to older and far less handsome actors. But in the original stories, Watson is a ladies’ man. Whenever an attractive woman appears at 221B Baker Street, he takes a keen interest. He even married one of Holmes’ clients.
The movie’s main idea, though, is really bad: to turn Holmes and Watson into action movie buddies, like Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in the Lethal Weapon series (another Joel Silver franchise).
Movie producers have inflicted worse indignities on the celebrated duo, though. In 1970, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes opened with hints that they were a gay couple. The idea was quickly dropped, foundering on the rocks of Watson’s foursquare heterosexuality, and Holmes’ equally committed asexuality.
In the more recent Without A Clue, Watson was a detective genius who hired Holmes, a drunken actor, as his frontman. The joke was funny for about five minutes, after which the movie died.
There have been countless Baker Street pastiches, many much better than those two. The more successful ones benefit from an understanding that the Holmes-Watson friendship is not sacred, exactly, but simply too good to mess around with.
For instance, Nicholas Meyer’s wonderful The Seven Percent Solution from the ’70s was a highly irreverent take: Holmes is incapacitated by cocaine-fueled paranoid delusions and Watson has to take him to Sigmund Freud for treatment. But the friendship between the brilliant but vulnerable Holmes and the steadfast, humble Watson operates as engagingly as in the original stories.
One reason for Seven Percent’s success is that it was a novel before it was a movie. You can’t completely disentangle the Holmes and Watson characters from their roles as self-conscious hero and admiring narrator.
Once you’ve read the stories as often as I have, you realize that they don’t really make sense, except as performances Holmes puts on to impress and entertain Watson. His showiest displays of deductive reasoning often have nothing to do with solving the mystery at hand. His trick of announcing that he has identified the villain, then holding back until he can stage-manage the most dramatic revelation, is frequently repeated. Watson is unfailingly impressed.
We would all love to have a friend like Watson. He is as keenly appreciative of Holmes’ virtues as he is tolerant of Holmes’ faults. Much of the comedy and pathos of the stories arises from his blindness to Holmes’ dependence on him. In a famous moment in one of the later stories, he is wounded and Holmes declares his affection — to Watson’s wonder.
Alert readers have already picked up on the clues Conan Doyle drops that the great detective’s neediness is equal to his egotism. One story opens at 221B, when the doorbell rings and Watson asks Holmes if it’s a friend come to call. “Aside from yourself I have none,” Holmes replies.
The Holmes stories vary considerably in quality; Conan Doyle got very tired of writing them. But the best are brilliant pieces of compressed storytelling; they have charm, humor and ingenuity that will easily survive a generic big-budget action picture whose heroes happen to be named Holmes and Watson.
My advice is that on Christmas Day, when the movie opens, you stay home from the multiplex and read Conan Doyle’s Christmas story, The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.
[ back ]
