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Tonight, esrblog and I braved the rainy cold post-Christmas weather to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie. I've been eager to see the movie since I first saw the trailer. The fact that most reviewers and patrons who have seen it, have either loved or hated it (with no middle ground) made me even more curious.

I do not need more than a short lj-cut in this review, because there's really very little plot I need to discuss here. In a real sense, the plot didn't much matter; what made the movie was the interaction of the main characters, and the performances of the actors who played them; particularly Downey, Law, and McAdams.

Some of my acquaintances who saw the movie claimed to be disappointed that it was not the "real" or canonical Sherlock Holmes. I believe they're mistaken. To the contrary, Downey did a masterful job of bringing to life the Holmes of the Conan Doyle stories, who actually did:

* Take drugs to alleviate his boredom when he did not have a case to occupy his energies;
* Was a keen boxer and a good shot;
* Engage in unorthodox experiments in his rooms.

If anything, Downey and the scriptwriters toned *down* one aspect that was striking about the original character--namely, Holmes's propensity to be cutting with people, regardless of gender or rank, whom he perceived as wasting his time.

To my surprise, Jude Law as Dr. Watson nearly stole the show. Not only is he shown as helping Holmes out of difficulties and acting as a sounding board for his theories (perfectly canonical), he is shown as being much keener of perception and swifter to catch on to developments than the Watson of the stories. He is only a half-step behind Holmes, as opposed to the one-and-one-half step(s) of the canonical Watson, and the character is much improved thereby. As other reviewers have said, Law and Downey as Watson and Holmes perfectly capture the feel of the way two old friends and long-time roommates would interact, and it made the movie that much more fun to watch.

Watson and Holmes are so well-matched that McAdams, as Irene Adler, has a hard time carving her own path into the movie. Here it's hard to make accusations of non-canon characterization, since relatively little about her appears in the Holmes stories (though her operatic career has been jettisoned for a more mundane background). But the movie *does* succeed in making plausible one detail that has always been less than completely explained--namely, Holmes's fascination with her. To explain what I mean without spoilering, I do have to resort to a brief cut.

The movie makes Holmes's attraction to Adler more blatantly sexual than in the stories, though it does not show them in inappropriate public behavior, or even semi-unclothed. However, there is a marvelous scene at the beginning of the denouement, where Holmes and Adler, having found the villain's destructive device and must render it inoperative. The few seconds during which they brainstorm a solution shows us that Holmes's fascination with Adler is intellectual--they are fellow science geeks who have managed to find each other in a relentlessly mundane world. Really, the scene reminded me of Flint and Sam bonding in "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs." It was very appealing.

Finally, Watson's financee Mary (who is something of a non-entity in the stories) emerges as a woman of spirit here--one who takes a quite reasonable dislike to Holmes because she deduces, correctly, that Holmes is attempting to prevent, or at least postpone, the day when Watson will finally leave 221B Baker Street in favor of a marital abode with her. Kelly Reilly is to be commended.

The setting is plausibly, though not perfectly, late Victorian London. The filmmakers, as filmmakers have done since historically-based movies have been made, ignored contemporary notions of female beauty and given Irene a style of makeup (darkly eyeshadowed and eyelinered eyes) that was not used even by "fast" women in the period. Both women also wear day dresses with necklines that plunge rather more than would have been the case in period dress (probably because the plot did not provide any occasions where evening dress could have been worn).

But that is a minor caveat. The fascinating part is that these ingredients have produced an amazingly close approximation of Conan Doyle's (anti?) hero. It's not a laugh riot, but it's a wonderfully interesting take on a character who must have seemed fantastic and unreal when he was first written--the man of action who nonetheless calculates every move and uses every bit of input at his command to stay ahead of his enemies.

And in case you wondered, the phrase "Elementary, my dear Watson!" does not make an appearance, even once.