Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows understands one thing well: There are few joys as great in life as having a good enemy. Chess players know it well. The clock ticks. The sweat forms on the brow. The mind racks itself, drained and strained. Mano-a-mano, tête-à-tête, blow for blow, two men go in — and one comes out. No, we can’t all get along. A man is known by his friends, but he is remembered by, and for, his enemies. Where would Batman be without the Joker? Superman without Lex Luthor? Professor X without Magneto? There’s something aristocratic about it — that one man must be subservient to another — but the greatest villains are those who could have been the greatest of heroes. They remind us of the choices our heroes make that made them other than the villain. Economics may be the study of choices, but drama is its portrayal.
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Which brings us to Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty. Robert Downey Jr.’s Holmes is a role Downey was born to play, as he established in the first film. The manic, brilliant, drug-addled Holmes is well captured by the manic, brilliant, formerly drug-addled Downey. Jude Law’s loyal yet prickly Watson is a nice contrast to Holmes’s absent-mindedness. Holmes’s disguises, playful and comedic, are perhaps too much so, but it is clear that Downey loves playing dress-up — though we could have done without Holmes in drag. Holmes’s archenemy, Professor Moriarty, is well played by Jared Harris of Mad Men fame. In both characters, we see the look of recognition of a peer and the longing that a genius’s soul has for a counterpart — even a malevolent one.
In this portrait, director Guy Ritchie pays a fitting tribute to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. “Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius,” Doyle wrote in “The Valley of Fear.” And Holmes — who at first appears mad — instantly recognizes the mad genius of Moriarty. He is immediately shocked, as he is intrigued, by the intricacies of Moriarty’s machinations. Moriarty is, we’re told, “the Napoleon of crime,” plotting from behind his professorial chair at a prestigious university. (Tenure sure has its perks.) By day lecturing on physics and math, by night planning world domination, Moriarty is intensely preparing a formula for upsetting Europe’s balance of power. Still, the professor has time to play mental — and later actual — chess with Holmes as he contemplates assassination, murder, and world war. This sounds implausible, and it is to Ritchie’s credit that the scenes between Moriarty and Holmes (and Sarah Greenwood’s production design of period England) are almost enough to save his film from formulaic conventionalism.
Alas, Ritchie goes a trope too far by having Moriarty do it all for a buck. In a tired story line you have seen or heard many times before, Moriarty is hoping to make money off Europe’s descent into chaos and mechanized slaughter. It’s capitalism, not a love of crime, that sets him in motion, and even his capitalism is based not on evil genius but on keen insight that a war is coming anyway and he might as well profit. A profiteer he may well be, but the sinister element is missing.
In so doing, Ritchie cheapens Moriarty’s evil. The specter of mass killing hangs over the film for a moment, only to be banished by the awesome power of mechanized Europe. This wouldn’t be bad if it were more fully explored. Holmes and Watson note the coming of the automobile, but only dimly notice the tanks, machine guns, and modern cannon, all of which make their deafening debut.
Doyle portrayed the use of drugs by Holmes as a negative that diminished his powers and posed a threat to his existence. I hope the movie does the same instead of the modern version that it is just another lifestyle choice.
That's not 100% clear. Watson does reprimand Holmes, and it does seems that at some point Holmes gives it up, but in the earlier stories Holmes justifies it "to stimulate his mind", to avoid an "engine being raced". At the end of The Sign of Four, the last sentence is one in which Holmes says that he still has his cocaine.
Bottom line: I think it's somewhat complex.
Of course, the dangers of the drug weren't known as well back then. So whatever Holmes did should not be an example in any case.
Sherlock Holmes: A Timely Aping of a More-Creative-Minds-Naming-Sense... of Thrones.
The minds of these marketers is unfertile, barren soil over which they rake the stale dried out seeds of another man's imagination, and I will rightly in kind never give them a dime of my money or time.
Holmes, by his own admission, disguised himself as a female on several occasions. In one story, I believe that he actually secured a marriage proposal from a groomsman.
That's not right at all. Holmes does become engaged while in disguise, but his "intended" is the parlor maid of Charles Augustus Milverton, and SH is playing the role of a plumber. (He assures a disapproving Watson that his rival for the maid's affections will be quick to take up the promise on which he's defaulted.)
Nor do we ever see Holmes employing female disguise in any of the Doyle stories. There is one occasion -- in the late and a-typical tale, The Mazarin Stone (told in the 3rd person, and not related by Watson) -- in which Billy the page boy at 221B tells the visiting Dr. Watson that SH had gone out dressed as an old woman as part of his current case (Billy found the disguise convincing).
On a related subject, Holmes appears to have had a blind spot when it comes to penetrating cross-dressing disguises. Irene Adler dressed as a young man, and the ally of Jefferson Hope dressed as an old woman, both manage to defy the brain that boasted of being able to expose any disguise.
My problem with te two new Sherlock Holmes movies is that the producers have expropriated the name Sherlovk Holmes and the myriad of images and associations that that name connotes. They have made a "vehicle" for Robert Downey Jr. because he is hot after the Iron Man role. One can imagine that there were many Hollywood "lunchs" in which somone pitched Downey as the next James Bond or Tarzan.
I can hear them complaining "It's not easy to find an established heroic role for a small. old drug abuser". Wait! Wasn't Sherlock Holmes a druggie too? That's it! Sherlock Holmes it is.
What's interesting about the Holmes-Moriarty rivalry as Doyle portrayed it is that its major movements occur on the perifery of the action in the stories. Moriarty never actually appears in any of the tales except in the recollections of a speaker (usually Holmes) -- and of course, as a malignant influence over events (as in The Valley of Fear). So there's a lot of latitude for writers to try to conceive plots and motives for the Napoleon of Crime.
But I agree with Charles Johnson that Moriarty is not primarily mercenary. In ascribing a motive to him, Holmes himself can only vaguely speculate that Moriarty's criminality is a response to dark, ancestral tendencies -- as if something in his very nature calls him to pursue evil, and the actual execution of it is incidental.
As for the present film series, although I am very orthodox in my taste for Holmes adaptations, I enjoyed Downey Jrs' portrayal and the first film, and will see the second with enthusiasm. I am satisfied that we have seen the greatest Holmes impersonations in Brett and Rathbone, and this current series strikes me as respectfully imaginative, and affectionate towards the sources.
A little sad that Doyle's creation, with it's emphasis on reason and logic, is turned into $125 million of explosions and special effects. But movies are a visual experience.
So first the Muppets, and now Sherlock Holmes. Liberal Hollywood just doesn't get it!
From Susan of Texas:
"Nobody who profits from capitalism or worships power wants to be told that ordinary-or even extraordinary--people act out of greed and their acts end up killing or harming millions of people. They want a black and white world of good and evil where evil is a disembodied force stalking the land, for which nobody is directly responsible. They do not want to know that their leaders are ordinary, petty, selfish, greedy men who attain enough power to do whatever they want and ignore the consequences."
