Sherlock Holmes

Don’t heed the purists. Have some fun spotting the liberties Ritchie takes with Doyle’s characters.

Okay, the purists will be baying for my blood, but I think Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes is great fun. Because Ritchie fearlessly takes the most sacred of English fictional icons, pulls him down from the pedestal, and pokes fun at him, while giving the audience a good old thrilling ride where nameless dread lurks around every foggy London corner and nothing is to be taken seriously. It’s Bertie Wooster meets Indiana Jones.

The story? Let it suffice that it’s another sinister plot to take over the world, with only a sleep-deprived, brain-addled and socially handicapped Sherlock Holmes in the way. With help from Dr John D Watson (it has long been suspected that Watson wasn’t as dumb and docile as Doyle painted him) and Irene Adler (the one woman Holmes considered his intellectual equal; see A Scandal in Bohemia). For people not exposed to ‘the canon’ (which is how Holmes stories are referred to by true believers), Holmes should be a fine thriller, and for the disciples, it should be a highly interesting post-modern take to be chuckled over, and asides to be spotted (Watson has a limp, a reference to the Jezail bullet that lodged in his leg during the Afghan wars). The film doesn’t pander to clichés about Holmes, so no cocaine, no deerstalker hat, even his pipe is shaped differently from what we expect.

Principally, it’s about characterisation and relationship: that of and between Holmes and Watson. In Robert Downey Jr, we find a Holmes who is as quirky as it gets, facial tics and all, and a petulant egotist who is also strangely vulnerable. Watson (Law) is a long-suffering friend, but an equal, quite different from the good doctor created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Yes, the purists will howl, since Ritchie’s Holmes does stuff hitherto reserved for that other English fictional icon, James Bond. But there should be room for interpretation of any literary figure, and Holmes the film is an affectionate and exuberant tribute to Holmes the character, with a subtle nudge and a not-so-secret wink.

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Sandipan Deb