Sherlock Holmes, etc.

During the last few weeks I read the complete Sherlock Holmes – all of the Holmes stories and novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. There were two reasons: 1) I was looking for cheap (preferably free) stuff to read on my Kindle for iPhone app and 2) I knew the movie was coming (and had been intrigued by the trailer) and the complete Holmes was only $0.99 so I downloaded it and read it. I enjoyed it and tweeted a few things about it. It really is a precursor to a lot of the procedural crime shows we have today. And a friend of mine pointed out that the tv show House is basically a Sherlock Holmes homage, down to the main character’s apartment number being 221B. (I have not seen any episodes of House.) Prior to these last few weeks my exposure to Holmes had been minimal. As a child I read a kid’s version of Hound of the Baskervilles and really liked it. And of course, there were the ST:TNG episodes that had Data playing Holmes in the holodeck. Apart from those, most of what I had gathered about Holmes had just been through cultural osmosis. Thus, my inclination to go back to the source before seeing the movie.

Now, I am not someone who insists that remakes, spinoffs, and homages based on classic works hew strictly to the particular details of the original, although I do prefer that they keep to and appreciate the spirit of the original, as much as possible. (I’m a purist about some things, but not this.) I think that Star Trek this summer did a good job of honoring the spirit of the earlier franchise, for example. And, having just recently read for the first time the entire Sherlock Holmes canon, I think the new movie does that for Holmes as well. I won’t recap the major plot points and such – there are plenty of reviews that do that. Apart from the scale of the criminal enterprise (much larger than in most of the stories) that Holmes was battling here, a few things that struck me as interesting or surprising: the relationship between Holmes and Watson was played as a bit more of a bromance (new word I learned from reading the reviews) than the original stories might have warranted, but only just a little. They were quite tight in the books/stories, as well. Some of the reviews have complained that Downey’s Holmes is too much of an action figure, but in fact he did have physical altercations in the stories and his character was apparently very well-trained and effective at that part of things. In other words, he wasn’t wholly a cerebral character in the stories, although that may have been lost in subsequent interpretations.

There was a bit too much ‘damsel in distress’ stuff in the movie, although the Irene Adler character could have been drawn much worse. She had her own agenda, which was good to see. (One thing I noted upon finishing the stories was that it was nice to read a set of procedurals in which a woman was not raped, tortured, or murdered in 3 out of 4 episodes. There are several otherwise decent television shows that I just can’t watch anymore for this reason.) In the Holmes movie, I was totally bored by the ‘escape the meatgrinder just in time’ scenes. In one case it was a literal meatgrinder. But that seems to be a trope/crutch that Hollywood just cannot let go of. I always find those sequences in movies incredibly boring while at the same tense-making. They’re some of what make me feel most manipulated while watching Hollywood movies — you know the good guys are going to get away, and yet you become tense, anyway. Yuck. Often I close my eyes and tell TheGuy to just let me know when it’s over.

I’ve seen at least one reviewer claim (read a bunch – don’t remember where I saw this; sorry) that it was Sherlock Holmes morphed into Jason Bourne. An amusing quick description, but one that I think is unfair. And don’t get me wrong, I liked the Bourne movies and always enjoy a fun spy thriller or caper movie. But I think that such facile comparisons miss an important point about cultural and literary heritage. They forget that all of culture is essentially a remix. One might, for example, be able to trace a lineage from the original Holmes stories to many of the mystery, detective, and spy thrillers of the late 20th-century, and on to the Bourne movies of the past decade or so, and then circling back around to Holmes again. There’s nothing wrong with that, but when I read that I thought it was a bit unfair. Conan Doyle came well before Robert Ludlum, after all.

Given our schedules and other factors, we rarely get to see movies anymore, which is probably why now that we had a chance to see a decent one I’ve been reading a bit more than I usually do about it. And, as so often happens when I happen to be read up on a topic, I discover that our esteemed fourth estate gets things wrong. A lot. Even about comparatively simple stuff like entertainment. Most disappointing to me was Roger Ebert’s review of this movie. (I’m not a movie buff and I don’t read a lot of reviews, but TheGuy has long been a fan of Ebert and I’ve been exposed to his stuff a bit – can’t stand the guy, Roeper, that he worked with for awhile, but that’s another post). Anyway, Ebert made several factual errors in his review.

First, he claims that in the canonical universe of Conan Doyle that Watson was typically “fretful and frightened” — that was not at all the impression I got from reading the books. In some cases Watson was the muscle of the duo and as a former Army medic who’d seen action (if I’m recalling the details correctly), he was not an easily frightened sort. Second, he says, “Watson has decided for once and all to abandon the intimacy of 221B for the hazards of married life” – but, Watson did that in the books and stories, only to return after his wife died. Ebert claims, of the new movie, “Holmes’ canonical devotion to cocaine is here augmented by other drugs and a great deal of booze.” But I don’t recall seeing any explicit drug use by Holmes in the movie – in fact some reviews made a point of that departure from canon. Ebert claims that, “My Sherlock is above all fastidious” in contrast to Downey’s version. But, and on this point I’m less certain, I think I recall several instances in the book where Holmes would hole up in his room for days letting things get pretty messy and I also vaguely recall descriptions of piles of books and reference material all over the place. Ebert gets another Watson fact wrong (if there can be facts about fictional characters) when he claims that “Watson has always maintained quarters elsewhere.” Again, not true. Holmes and Watson met because Watson needed an apartment.

Anyway, the particulars of Ebert’s review don’t have much bearing on the movie, which was the nominal topic of this post, but it was just disheartening to me to find yet another example (among countless) of poor journalism about topics I happen to know something about. Pretty maddening, the state of journalism these days. And I did expect better from Ebert.

Back to the movie – about 10 minutes before the end I leaned over and asked TheGuy, “Do you think they’ll be making a sequel?” And then just a few minutes later I got my answer. I do look forward to the sequel, and like the Bond flicks, this is a universe and character with endless opportunity for new stories. If they can keep the quality level above Hollywood-mediocre, a sequel or two might be worth Netflixing!