Sherlock Holmes: Out with the New, In with the Old

OUT WITH THE NEW, IN WITH THE OLD

Guy Ritchie’s 2009 Sherlock Holmes has everything audiences have come to expect and love in adaptations of the classic stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (remember him?). While they might not have anything to do with their originals anymore, most Holmes adaptations in film and television have adhered to a set of recognizable tropes that persist even through works that deliberately try to subvert them. Guy Ritchie’s film is full of Jolly Old Empire embellishments, extravagantly blown up to Guy Ritchie size. Seedy pawn shops, grimy docks, and noxious fog abound. And despite all his movie’s clever, cunning, and captivating special effects, Guy Ritchie still knows that nothing beats a good old-fashioned caper in a fake nose.

More than just the familiar allusions to Doyle’s world will ring a bell in most viewers’ minds, however. This Holmes’s cynical wisecracks have a more recent inspiration in another readily recognizable Holmesian characterization — Robert Downey Jr’s Sherlock Holmes acts, talks, and even looks a little like a waistcoated Gregory House. His surprising soft spots, his unusual hobbies, his dubious love affair — all probably remind audiences first of the recent television series “House,” and secondarily of Doyle’s master sleuth. In many ways, the most recent film version of Sherlock Holmes capitalizes on the popularity of “House” and the standards it has created for the Holmes myth, as well as the tropes that it has encouraged in the imaginations of mystery lovers who watch the show. After “House” used the Holmes paradigm to create a new model, Sherlock Holmes reclaimed the peculiarities of “House” for the Holmes side.

When the television series “House” premiered in 2004, it was lauded for its style and originality, but mystery readers recognized something familiar. Dr. Gregory House is a misanthropic genius who dulls his boredom with illicit drugs and solves mysteries not to help his fellow man, but for the intellectual thrill: House is a modern Sherlock Holmes. Just like the Sherlock Holmes stories, each episode of “House” is a puzzle, and the only person holding all the pieces is the title character. But there are supporting characters to help the audience out — the research fellows who may not always have the answers, but stumble across important clues, purposefully or inadvertently (like the police in the Holmes stories); and the best friend, Wilson, who, like Dr. Watson of the Sherlock Holmes stories, listens to House’s theories and prompts him to dig deeper, even if Wilson himself can’t see to the bottom.

After more than five seasons, “House” has taken on a life of its own, with side-plots and emotional developments that depart completely from the original Sherlock Holmes premise. This is by no means a failure — in order to sustain the show’s momentum and interest, the writers had to confront Holmes more as a launching point than a continuous framework for the show. House undergoes romance, reformation, and selfdoubt alien to most viewer’s memory of Sherlock Holmes. And his fellows, friends, and supervisors play out minor dramas that contribute to the show’s themes about the mutability of modern love, postmodern fears, and medicine’s ambiguous role in human relationships.

By 2009, “House” had already been established as a benchmark of current mystery storytelling. By that time viewers were ready for something new, a movie with a quirky re-envisioning of the television show’s themes and style — Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes.

During this game of tug-of-war, the story’s historical setting has undergone a significant transformation as well. Previous adaptations of the Holmes stories have tended to be more staid, harping on the primness of Victorian life and Holmes’s departure from those strictures. Villains’ seediness tended to be a blot on this Victorian life as well — in the more tame parlor mysteries, even a villain’s state of degradation was somehow picturesque. However, Guy Ritchie’s rendition embraces all the seediness, dirtiness, disorderliness and gothic horror imagined of the Victorian era in recent films like Sweeney Todd and The Prestige. With inspiration like this and “House,” Arthur Conan Doyle is barely necessary at all. But his absence doesn’t render the characters any less recognizable — or the movie any less than thoroughly entertaining, belonging securely to the spirit of the original stories.

This historical give-and-take isn’t anything new. Shakespeare and Jane Austen have been punted back and forth in time enough to make anyone dizzy. And each time an historical story returns from the future, it brings back juicy new anachronisms — stamps of modern audiences’ expectations and desires. Sherlock Holmes stands out, however, because unlike the frameworks set up by Shakespeare of Austen, his is not often considered a universal story — in most readers’ and viewers’ minds, Holmes is normally firmly attached to his timeperiod. That’s what makes it so fascinating to observe how he has been painstakingly extracted from that setting, made over anew, and placed back into it.

The 2009 Sherlock Holmes is not a towering work of art. It is a fast-paced, humorous, unabashed action movie. But even the most die-hard Sherlock Holmes fan has to admit that the original stories are about as formulaic as an episode of “House” — and that their continuing entertainment value comes, not so much from the mystery itself, as from the audience’s existing knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, the characters solving the mystery. Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes uses that understanding to ignite a characterhumor driven plot, in which the revelation of a London politician’s hidden agenda might not be as memorable as the scene featuring a naked Holmes abandoned, handcuffed to a bed, by his ex-lover — but then again, who really cares? If “House” proved that the timelessness of Holmes is not dependent on his historical setting, then 2009’s Sherlock Holmes proved that a dick joke never gets old.

Sherlock Holmes (2009) Rating: PG13; Director: Guy Ritchie; Written by: Michael Robert Johnson, Anthony Peckham and Simon Kinberg; Starring: Robert Downey, Jr. (Sherlock Holmes), Jude Law (Dr. John Watson), Rachel McAdams (Irene Adler), Mark Strong (Lord Blackwood); PG-13, Runtime: 128 mins; Released by Warner Brothers Pictures, 2009.

HANNAH STERNBERG, HNR’s Film Editor, is a writer and filmmaker in Washington, DC. To read about her upcoming debut novel, visit http://hannahsternberg.blogspot.com.