…blog more often!

Here’s one:

Thanks to Mark Gibbons for pointing me to this news item:

Robert Downey Jr ‘to play Holmes’

Anyone whose reaction to this news is ‘oh, wow, that’s going to be great!’ might prefer to stop reading now. Actually, no, what am I saying? It’s exactly those people who should continue reading…

Apparently the Ritchie version is going be ‘less stuffy’ than previous versions, which no doubt means Sherlock Holmes will be an irritating cockney twat. Why on Earth you would even try to make Sherlock Holmes less stuffy is beyond me; the character just ceases to be Sherlock Holmes if you do that. The whole point is that he’s completely relentless, single-minded and consumed by the need to solve the mystery. The success that brings him as a detective is mirrored by his loneliness and isolation (yes, there’s Watson, but in the original stories, Watson is only a temporary lodger, who marries and moves out before too long, leaving Holmes as something of a recluse who Watson does his best to drop in on from time to time). Is this new Holmes going to be a playboy with a string of super-model girlfriends to his name, as well? Bollocks.

I suppose the argument for making him less stuffy is that the modern audience can’t empathise with him, but that’s nonsense – whether or not an audience can empathise with any character is down to the skill of the depiction.

There’s just enough humanness in Holmes to show that he is capable of feeling the loneliness that his obsession brings him - there’s a moment in one of the stories where he thinks Watson has been shot and he explodes with rage; there’s the sort of weird mixed, emotion he displays at Irene Adler, the woman who manages to actually deceive and outwit him; and there’s one or two victims for whom Holmes shows moments of genuine sympathy or fondness - but that’s it; it’s just enough to show that he’s human, and that he obviously is capable of feeling something, which hints at the possibility of loneliness without making him an unfortunate character. If you fiddle with that - either by taking away his feelings completely, or, as Ritchie seems likely to do, making him more human - then he just ends up tediously perfect where he’s supposed to be a flawed genius. He’s a cocaine addict for crying out loud - are they going to glamourise that and make it part of his bad-boy cool?

Why people insist on meddling with characters like this, I don’t know. There’s always the trite argument about ‘doing something new’, but that’s plainly just bollocks - it’s not new, it’s just inferior to the original, and completely misses the point. Do something new by all means, but doing a shit version of Sherlock Holmes certainly doesn’t qualify - they’ve been doing that for years.

The same is true of a great many well-known, archetypal characters – Tarzan, for instance – something about these characters, perhaps the lack of ownership an adapting director or writer feels over the character, seems to fill them with the desire to tinker to no good end.

It astonishes me how awful, by and large, any attempts to film characters like these have been. They’re not hard stories to adapt - in the case of Sherlock Holmes, they’re recounted in exactly the manner mysteries are depicted on screen, and they’re heavy on dialogue; you could virtually film them off the page, but for reasons I can’t understand, successive writers, directors and producers insist on making life hard for themselves by trying to fix what wasn’t broken in the first place.

There are some reasonably good adaptations of Sherlock Holmes of course, but even those are often spoilt by completely needless (and frankly nonsensical) tinkering, like placing them in a contemporary period or relocating them to the USA while leaving Holmes as an Englishman. Basil Rathbone always seemed to me to have a good version of the character, for instance, but the stories are somewhat wayward and oddly chosen, to say the least - Nazis in a lot of them, I see to recall.

The thing that makes me laugh is that, what with this tendency to tinker with characters like Sherlock Holmes, those involved would actually stand more chance of seeming like they were doing something ‘new’ if they just did it straight up. It’s sort of gone full circle in that regard. If you did a straight adaptation of one of the original Sherlock Holmes stories, complete with all the details and nuances that have dropped out of the less subtle archetype we’ve got now, then people would probably be astonished. I bet a lot of them would have a hard time believing half that stuff was in the stories in the first place.

So, to give this some broader relevance, I’ll sum up by saying if you’re aim is to do something new, don’t confuse it with the aim of trying to restore an old favourite to prominence. Both are laudable aims, but not to be combined. Restoring the fame of a once-loved character is a question of reminding people what was there to love in the first place, not replacing it with something you’ve decided they’ve come to love instead in the meantime. Whatever it was that made the character popular or worthy of attention in the first place will, by simple fact of its long absence, seem new in itself; nothing else is needed.

Incidentally, I’m led to believe that the three most filmed characters are, in order, Holmes, Dracula and Tarzan. Oddly, they all seem to suffer from the same curse in adaptation - perhaps that’s why studios continue to adapt them so frequently. All of them are characters which, given how ubiquitous they are, you’d think there would have been a definitive, comprehensive treatment of years ago, but there really just hasn’t been. Guy Ritchie won’t be the one to manage it for Sherlock Holmes; I would wager much on that.

Matt