I come to praise Guy Ritchie’s eminently entertaining “Sherlock Holmes,” not to bury it.
Also to speak in favor of retooling the past for the present.
As our culture grows up less and less educated in the classics and increasingly tutored in such contemporary skills as Excel and free downloading, it’s the only chance we’ve got of keeping the flame of immortality. And in the hyperbole that is filmmaker Ritchie’s lock, stock and trade, we should see good things.
That’s why we should enjoy -- rather than be mortally outraged by -- the depiction of Holmes as an acrobat, kung fu master, boxing genius, silent film comedian and verbal quipster who could render Cary Grant into jealous silence.
He’s Super Sherl with a nuclear-powered pipe.
And besides, even though his movie seems to be an over-the-top, Batman-esque take on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s four novels and 56 short stories, many of the details in the movie can be found in the source material.
No, the literary Sherlock Homes -- played most winningly in the movie by Robert Downey, Jr. -- did not experiment with a crude, early prototype of the gun silencer, as he fired holes into his apartment wall. But the literary Holmes indeed fired holes into his apartment wall at 221B Baker Street to form the initials VR (Victoria Regina), to commemorate his queen’s coronation. There’s a little bit of validity, and willfully outrageous expansion everywhere.
No, there was no Lord Blackwood in the Scottish-born Doyle’s brilliant works, but this creation of a dark lord who dabbles in the occult fits entirely with our times. It’s not enough for villains to get up to superficially dastardly mischief. They must take evil to its deepest, darkest extreme.
And it doesn’t take a lifetime of Bond movies for us all to know that the future of the world must truly be in jeopardy, or the kids won’t come see the movie. Hollywood has always understood that movies must be client-centered. Audience uber alles.
It is great fun to watch the movie and not just because Ritchie and his writers -- Michael Robert Johnson, Anthony Peckham, Simon Kinberg and Lionel Wigram -- have cannily combined classic and contemporary. But because they understand what makes a character so compelling in an era when the outlandish, the stupendous and the apocalyptic is the barest minimum we expect from a movie experience.
Deep down, what we want in our hero is what I call mastery of the moment. That is, we love our hero -- or heroine -- to think on his feet.
And in “Sherlock Holmes,” Downey’s Holmes is a forensic genius of life, a master of everything available to the rational mind. He’s the Tweedy, late 19th century version of Leonardo Da Vinci, who was versed in painting, architecture, geometry, mechanics, municipal construction and human anatomy. Who made the first prototype of the submarine and tank. Who designed flying machines.
Oh, and did we mention he painted the friggin’ Mona Lisa?
What we love about Holmes and Leonardo, is also what we love about all those “CSI” TV shows -- that ability to use the known sciences in the series of fast moving, seat of the pants moments called life.
