Elementary, my dear Ritchie

"... For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain. All my years of humble but single-minded service culminated in that moment of revelation."— Dr. John H. Watson, The Adventure of the Three Garridebs.

The lines above allude to some kind of warmth between Sherlock Holmes and John H. Watson for sure; but is that gay warmth? I don’t have a clear answer after sitting through the film, nor do I think Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have guessed the question might ever arise. But a lot of people seem to be more interested in knowing if Sherlock was gay than, say, the secret of his intriguing power of deduction— what with Rotten Tomato’s flourishing forum on the subject and the Tsunami of tweets cluttering the web space.

So, it’s a whole new gallery Sherlock Holmes is playing to— people who think Jermy Brett was a dud and Basil Rathbone a wimp and that all early audiovisual renditions of the detective have been, at best, unstylish. But it’s them that the movie studios pin their great hopes on. So you have a Guy Ritchie at the task of refashioning the old sleuth. And he swiftly yanks the deerstalker off Sherlock’s head and frees it from the burden of nostalgia; as he believes there hasn’t been a second man on the British soil who would tolerate a deerstalker!

This shouldn’t mean I am criticising Ritchie for what he did to Sherlock. The film has a free-flowing gait, from beginning to end, and is enjoyable to many. His lead actor is at his Juniorish best; he capers, gapes, throws jabs at calculated angles, jabbers – often in a self-ridiculing manner and pleads with Watson like a kid (or a homosexual?) not to leave. The details that Ritchie picked up from Sherlock Holmes stories and novels are in place. The digital rendition of the Tower Bridge construction site is brilliant, so are the late nineteenth-century London streets. But the mess at 221B Baker Street is where Ritchie stands out. True to Watson’s description that he (Sherlock) “gets in the dumps at times”, it’s the most extraordinarily messy 221B ever shown in films.

Watson (Jude Law), more than just a sidekick here, is modish to the risk of looking like a dandy. But his salvation has more justification in its favour than poor Holmes has for his. Haven’t we often wondered why Watson wouldn’t be a little more interesting? Here’s one who more than looks compatible to Holmes, witty and often pulling off tricks to save his companion.

After the gay angle and the makeover, it was apparent that Ritchie would have Irene Adler up his sleeve, the one and only woman to have outdone Holmes in the battle of grey cells. Here, she actuates the flow of gonadal hormones for a change! In original works, Holmes mentions her as ‘the woman’ and there is hardly anything to suggest they came close to each other. Ritchie takes a lot of liberties, which, for all the prevailing opinions that Irene’s charm worked, has stripped her of the mystic aura Doyle wound around her, besides leaving true Sherlockians in unspoiled befuddlement. The puckish eyes of our new Holmes should bear part of the blame. At times, they almost make him look like one on the prowl to satisfy his unfulfilled desires to fornicate!

Any original story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle didn’t fit the bill of Ritchie. What his story department manufactured instead is the type copyrighted by Dan Brown. One’s recourse to such a story for a Sherlock Holmes film tells a lot about one’s belief that occult, zombies and homosexuality sell. Major studios in Hollywood believe that, and it was Guy Ritchie’s first big break in Hollywood bobbed with a few sequel promises. Let’s hope the sequels will not show a detective again who coincidentally bears Sherlock Holmes’ name.


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