Venue: Cine 1, Ster-Kinekor
Maerua Mall
Film: SHERLOCK HOLMES
Director: Guy Ritchie
Screenplay: Michael Robert Johnson; Anthony Peckham
Players: Robert Downey Junior; Jude Law; Rachel McAdams; Marc Strong; Eddie Marsan
Kelly Reilling; Geraldine James
Genre: crime; action comedy; historical
Rating: ****½
Regardless of a good selection of strong films in Windhoek at the moment, cinema fanatics should not miss this wonderful burlesque romp which gently spoofs Arthur Conan Doyle’s quirky characters without destroying their essential literary integrity. They are all there: eccentric Holmes (Downey Jnr), a trifle more greasy and grubby than the traditional interpretation; Dr John Watson (Law), torn between conservative mores and an innate love of adventure and the absurd; Inspector Lestrade, the bureaucratic detective-policeman, attacking the crime scene with a bulldog tenacity which compensates for a lack of critical observation and creative interpretation; Moriarty( Marsan), the ultimate elusive villain; and Mary Morston (Reilling), Watson’s blonde but slightly vapid fiancée.
The film trailer does not do justice to a good story, a witty screenplay, some excellent sets and moody cinematography; the trailer, in fact, implies that the film is little more than rumbustious fight scenes and pyrotechnics, making it a set piece of action adventure.
The primary strength of the film lies in the depiction of the protagonists, Holmes and Watson. Throughout the film, there is a struggle between them to part company: Watson wants to marry his governess-fiancée, take his bulldog, Gladstone, and what is left of his clothing cupboard after Holmes’ ongoing pirating of his waistcoats, get married, and experience marital bliss in middle-class suburbia; Holmes struggles to accept that his unique friendship and working relationship with Watson is to be terminated and yearns for the boyish camaraderie to continue through infinite crime-solving romps. There’s no ‘stiff-upper lip’ about this Holmes, except where women are concerned. The essential misogyny of the original character is retained in the film, although he does reveal a weak spot for American master-criminal, Irene Adler (McAdam), who has been commissioned by Moriarty to divert Holmes emotionally from his 24/7 obsession with logic and deduction. Downey Jnr’s Holmes is a schizophrenic pendulum, swinging between black depression caused by inactivity and obsessive eagerness during the crime hunt for solutions. He is also humanized, however: he has an ongoing battle with his housekeeper, Mrs Hudson (James), performs dodgy experiments on Watson’s bulldog, endangering its life on more than one occasion; he is repulsively dirty and untidy; and his thinking processes are stimulated by the ubiquitous pipe - and by a violin, which is subjected to a zithery fiddling technique on more than one occasion. Law’s Watson is more sparky and argumentative than the Conan Doyle original, demonstrating deductive reasoning of his own, combined with an intellectual enjoyment of riposte with Holmes, giving as good as he gets. He is depicted as a gambler, a weakness which retards his intentions to purchase the engagement ring and prompts Holmes to keep Watson’s money in a safe place to curb the temptation.  In the first scene, Holmes is in a tight spot when Watson emerges from the shadows to assist, his pugilistic skills paramount. “Did you bring the shotgun?” yells Watson; “Thought I’d forgotten something!” muses Holmes, ”but thought I’d left the stove on!” “You did!” yells Watson, fighting on valiantly with his fists in the absence of a more powerful weapon. Later, upon finding Holmes in a stupor, while attempting a vague experiment of marginal interest, Watson comments laconically, “You know what you are drinking is meant for eye surgery?” Verbally, they tussle on more than one occasion on the difference between the definitions of ‘midget’ and ‘dwarf’.
“Death is only the beginning!” intones the arch-villain of this film, Lord Blackwood (Strong). With a strong aquiline nose and aristocratic cheekbones, this villain moves in elevated social circles and his father is Lord Chief Justice. He is also a powerful member of The Temple of the Four Orders, a mystical and secretive cult which embraces powerful political figures and practises intricate and bizarre rituals, an obvious dig at the Masons.
Director Ritchie has captured the atmosphere of Victorian London: the filth of Jacob’s Island, where petty criminals hide in the shadows; the bustling mercantile ventures of an Empire at its most powerful; the clopping of horses’ hooves and the black carriages with murky interiors barging over cobbled streets which are heaving with buskers and scam artists. The sets are magical, moodily evocative of Director David Lean’s black and white Dickens’ classics of years ago. The vast difference between rich and poor, between educated and illiterate, the ‘two worlds’ defined by Benjamin Disraeli, are captured with verve, style, and gusto.
The screenplay, apart from deepening character interpretation in every scene, is lively, witty and informative. Holmes’ wonderful powers of reasoning are given full vent. He critically observes and analyses both Watson’s fiancée (eliciting a glass of red wine in the face for his pains) and the Lord Chief Justice. He explains every mystery, every clue, every step in the reasoning process while quick flashbacks remind viewers of the cryptic clues, all of which we have missed. The screenplay allows Holmes wonderful witty one-liners. When he visits Blackwood in prison prior to his execution and observes cryptic mystical scribbling all over the walls, Holmes observes with dispassionate irony, “I love what you’ve done with the place.” When he meets Blackwood much later, after the latter had supposedly risen from the dead and killed at least 2 people, Holmes, in the middle of a wrestling match with the villain, notes “What a busy afterlife you’re having!”