A Tale Of Two Sherlocks

Sherlock Holmes is now big business, lads and lasses. It was clear from the rapturous reception given both to Guy Ritchie’s 2009 film and Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ 2010 TV reinvention of the character that there were still substantial audiences who wanted to see new or reimagined exploits of 221b Baker Street’s great inhabitant. Granted, they were entirely different in outlook – Ritchie’s film was a laddish caper that leant heavily on the charisma of Robert Downey Jnr as Holmes and Jude Law as Watson, whereas the Gatiss/Moffat series had a stunningly multi-faceted performance from Benedict Cumberbatch as a strange, apparently autistic Holmes – but both succeeded admirably as highly enjoyable mainstream entertainment.

Now, we see the next installments of both, in the shape of the film sequel A Game Of Shadows and the subsequent tranche of TV adaptations. The USP with the film was the much-heralded appearance of Holmes’ nemesis, ‘the Napoleon of crime’ Moriarty (who had appeared briefly in a cliffhanger at the end of the TV series) in an entirely original plot, whereas the BBC version adapted three of the most famous stories, beginning with a version of A Scandal In Bohemia, where the titular scandal is relocated to Belgravia. But which one wins?

Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, it’s the TV version by a substantial distance. The second Holmes film was much anticipated in the casting of Moriarty, with names such as Brad Pitt and Daniel Day-Lewis being bandied about. The eventual choice – Jared Harris – is a fine actor, who does a more than capable job in the part, but there’s a slight sense of ‘oh…’ to his appearance. This partly works in the film’s favour, but the problem comes when this sort of gimmicky, lightweight entertainment tries to play it at all seriously. Thus, Moriarty has the odd interesting character quirk – he makes a potentially fatal delay to feed pigeons in the park, and appears more genuinely moved during opera than when organising countless deaths – but by and large, he’s an identikit villain, with a Bondian scheme that becomes clear during the finale. The various action scenes are fine, the banter between Downey Jnr and Law again amuses and some of the locations are stunning, but it’s one of those frustrating sequels where the potential to deepen and darken has been muffed. Oh, and Noomi Rapace has about the most perfunctory female role in recent memory.

Not so the TV series. The first three episodes scored more highly in their reinvention of Holmes and Watson and the creation of their milieu than they did in terms of the plotting; the first ended with a run-of-the-mill denouement, the second one wasn’t particularly good and the third ended with a strong cliffhanger but the unexpectedly bizarre characterisation of Moriarty as a camp, psychopathic Irishman. This cliffhanger is resolved for laughs rather than thrills immediately, and then we’re into a rollicking yarn involving Holmes meeting his match in the character of Irene Adler, aka ‘The Woman’, a high-class dominatrix who has the unlikely goods on virtually every figure at the highest echelons of British society.

The episode, written by Moffat, fairly barrels along, with Irene Pulver’s icy, brilliant Adler a worthy match for Cumberbatch’s Holmes. It incorporates a stunningly choreographed scene of slow-motion violence (a possible hat-tip to the films?), Mark Gatiss dialling it right down as Holmes’ icy brother Mycroft, a warm and sympathetic Martin Freeman as the ever-exasperated Watson, a very satisfying denouement and a pleasingly ambiguous final scene. On the basis of this, the next couple of Sunday evenings are about to be very good fun indeed.

Hugo

Martin Scorsese has been on an exceptional run of it lately. After the flawed-but-occasionally-interesting Gangs Of New York, he has set himself up as a maker of exceptionally well crafted mainstream films, normally starring Leonardo DiCaprio, but has also dipped into music-related projects as eclectic as the recent George Harrison documentary Living In The Material World and the Rolling Stones’ concert film Shine A Light. He even won the much overdue Best Director Oscar a few years ago for the excellent The Departed.

He’s certainly a man who can do whatever he wants, joining a select few including Spielberg, Nolan and Fincher in a club where they can make passion projects at ludicrous expense and know that their commercial success or failure is all but irrelevant to their personal prestige, as the artistic quality of the films is likely to be high. All the same, Hugo (renamed from the book’s title The Invention Of Hugo Cabret) is a surprising departure. His first foray into what appears to be children’s films, as well as his first 3D film, it suffers from a slow opening and unfortunate detours into irrelevance, but has a central theme and message that represents Scorsese at his most heartfelt and sincere. Quite who it’s aimed at is anyone’s guess.

It begins with much exposition. Hugo (Asa Butterfield) is an orphan living in a 1930s Paris train station after the death of his mechanic father (Jude Law, in a tiny cameo) and the disappearance of his drunken uncle (Ray Winstone, similar). Making a living of sorts by petty thieving and avoiding the station master (Sacha Baron Cohen), he seeks to mend a broken automaton that his father brought home from a museum. Unfortunately, his plans are thwarted when the miserable toyshop owner, Georges (Ben Kingsley) confiscates his notebook as a punishment for Hugo’s stealing. His only hope is to elicit the help of Georges’ goddaughter Isabelle (Chloe Moretz) in an attempt to retrieve the notebook, repair the robot and see if, as he suspected, his father left him a last message.

The above summary doesn’t really do justice to what Scorsese’s grand aim is. It’s not much of a spoiler to reveal that Georges is in fact Georges Melies, founder of modern cinema but fallen on hard times when the film begins. Thus, about halfway through, Hugo turns into a wonderful and thrilling paean to the early days of silent cinema, conveying the fun and excitement of an unknown world in which anything seemed possible and everything could be achieved by hitherto unsuspected means. The film’s helped by excellent performances by Kingsley, Helen McCrory (as his wife and muse) and Michael Stuhlbarg (as the Melies-obsessed academic responsible for his eventual rehabilitation). It’s some of the most heartfelt and affecting stuff you’ll see at the cinema this year.

However, it bears comparatively little resemblance to the children’s film around it, which Scorsese doesn’t seem particularly interested in. Butterfield and Moretz are both fine, if increasingly peripheral, presences, but it’s the oddity of casting Baron Cohen, in a substantial role, that really mystifies. The character as portrayed is a wounded WW1 veteran with a leg support, a fierce dog and a penchant for sending unaccompanied children to the local asylum. Fine, a cartoonish Dickensian stock villain, to add some otherwise absent jeopardy. But there seems no rhyme or reason for his presence in the film, which bears no relation to the central plot, or his eventual rehabilitation as a sympathetic figure of sorts. It’s perfectly possible to see a Chris Cooper or a Ray Winstone doing very well in the role, as a bitter older man haunted by the memories of the trenches, but Baron Cohen’s arch and rather annoying performance doesn’t convince at all, meaning that all the various chase scenes, while visually impressive, are just so much padding.

So, a curate’s egg, then. But the good stuff is so good that one hesitates to describe this as a misstep, more as a fascinating curio that will always occupy a unique place in Scorsese’s extremely distinguished canon. Unless he makes Alvin And The Chipmunks: Chipfellas, that is.

Retrospective: The Talented Mr Ripley

This is the first in a series of occasional pieces about films, books, albums and other artistic media that I either didn’t write about when they first appeared or predate the life of this blog. I make no apologies for grand, sweeping statements, or for statements that might contradict what I’ve written elsewhere.

It’s widely accepted, and rightly, that the period between 1999-2000 was something of an annus mirabilis for cinema. While the mega-hyped first Star Wars prequel, The Phantom Menace, might have been a massive disappointment, an entire wave of interesting, challenging films popped up at the end of the millennium, such as Fight Club, Magnolia, Three Kings, Being John Malkovich, The Sixth Sense, The Matrix and many more. (Ironically the one that eventually won Best Film at the Oscars, American Beauty, has aged considerably less well than the others.)

Yet the film that I think is probably the greatest of them all is probably the least flashy, devoid of ‘ta-da!’ twists, spectacular visual effects and brain-warping conceits. Instead, it’s a remarkably simple, classically written, acted, directed and edited piece of cinema that derives most of its considerable power and interest from the talent of all of those involved. For some, it remains a high watermark in their careers; for others, it’s still a considerable piece of work, and one that they should be proud of.

For all that, it’s not been regarded as particularly seminal or important within the context of American film. It was memorably mocked in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back as ‘that gay serial killer film’, but it didn’t win any Oscars, won a BAFTA for Jude Law probably more out of BAFTA’s desire to reward home-grown talent than necessarily because of its innate merit, and did decent but unspectacular business at the box office. Compared to Anthony Minghella’s previous film, The English Patient (9 Oscars and countless other awards) it might have been seen by some as a bit of a disappointment.

Yet the first hints of a reappraisal came in 2008, when Anthony Minghella died at the untimely age of 54. Virtually every obituary decided that it was The Talented Mr Ripley, rather than The English Patient or Cold Mountain, that was his true legacy to cinema, and indeed since then the film’s cool beauty and fierce intelligence have continued to attract admirers. Not bad given the original reception it had, when critics (with a few notable exceptions) seemed vaguely bemused by it; Peter Bradshaw described it in the Guardian as ‘a dismayingly unthrilling thriller and bafflingly unconvincing character study’, and James Bernadelli compared it entirely unfavourably to the earlier adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel, Plein Soleil. But some saw its merits straight away, with Roger Ebert giving the film 4 out of 4 stars and saying ‘the movie is as intelligent a thriller as you’ll see all year’.

Of course, Anthony Minghella’s career is one of the most gratifyingly odd in cinema. He began his life as an academic and expert in Samuel Beckett, and then moved into a career as a scriptwriter and script editor on such programmes as Inspector Morse and Grange Hill. His debut proper, Truly, Madly, Deeply was a charming, low-budget meditation on grief that ended up winning him the BAFTA for best screenplay. His Hollywood debut, Mr Wonderful, wasn’t a hit or particularly regarded by critics, but The English Patient still holds up today as an example of an literate yet sweeping epic, unafraid to tempt comparisons to David Lean which are, by and large, justified. After Ripley, Cold Mountain was an ambitious, often successful return to the world of epic filmmaking, and Breaking & Entering was a hand-wringing drama about immigration and burglary that attracted little real affection. He was a tireless figure in the worlds not just of film (Chairman of the BFI) but of opera and even politics, directing Labour’s 2005 party political broadcast.

Something else about Minghella that every film of his boasts is his intelligence. Even Breaking And Entering offers a script that doesn’t provide pat, easy answers to the dilemmas that it poses, and what’s so refreshing about his pictures is the sense of the academic mind behind the studio facade, needling and demanding deeper, even harder answers than the ones necessarily being offered by pat happy endings and conventional three-act structures. Ripley, one of the smartest mainstream films ever made, is that rare beast that not only doesn’t insult one’s intelligence, but actively solicits an intellectual response as visceral as the emotional one at every point.

As with The English Patient, it differs considerably from its source. The central plot – Tom Ripley is sent to Italy by a shipping magnate to retrieve his ne’er-do-well son, Dickie Greenleaf, but Ripley ends up murdering him and assuming his identity – remains the same as Highsmith’s novel, but while the original book is witty, wonderfully amoral jazz, Minghella’s film is a statelier, sadder and more operatic view of what it means to gain the world and lose one’s soul – or, as Ripley puts it, ‘I always thought it’d be better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody’.

Such a statement is heartbreakingly misguided, and it’s to Matt Damon’s immense credit that he manages to convey every nuance of Minghella’s version of Tom Ripley. As an adaptation of the character that Highsmith wrote, it’s probably unlikely to appeal to purists, who should watch Malkovich’s brilliantly controlled murderer in Ripley’s Game or Alain Delon’s smooth charmer in Plein Soleil. For Highsmith, Ripley was a brilliant blank, a man able to improvise his way out of a situation as if he was taking part in a jazz recital, and clearly no stranger to the world of petty crime (or worse) at the start of the novel. For Minghella, Ripley is someone altogether more complex, a man whose dishonesty and ability to adopt other personae stems at least in part from the fact that he doesn’t appear to have any identity, any ties or any loyalty to anyone or anything. He’s a modestly talented musician, but it’s hinted that even these talents will end up being frustrated because of his inability to feel anything, other than a certain acquired technical proficiency.

What’s so marvellous about Damon’s performance throughout, and makes much more sense now that he’s become such a respected character actor, is that he perfectly conveys the slightest sense that his sojourn with Dickie and Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow) has become to humanise him. The obvious imputation is that he’s sexually attracted to the handsome, charismatic Dickie, and the film certainly makes few bones about his tentative homosexual advances, most notably in a bath scene that might even hint for a moment that Dickie himself considers dabbling in unfamiliar waters. But in  a sense, Ripley’s attraction to Dickie and Marge is less that of an opportunistic voyeur and more that of a man surprised to find himself with a friend, perhaps for the first time in his life. In a scene when Dickie and Ripley are walking through a galleria together, Dickie puts his arm round Ripley, in a careless gesture of affection, and Ripley beams with pure delight at what might be one of the few moments of physical contact he’s ever had that hasn’t been accompanied by a blow or a threat.

Of course, Dickie Greenleaf isn’t exactly the full shilling himself. Someone once said of Jude Law that he’s a great character actor who had the misfortune to be born into the looks and body of a matinee idol, and the great uncertainty that followed his early, star-making roles perhaps stems from this incongruity in his personality.  For, make no mistake, Dickie is an absolute shit. Charming, of course, and handsome to a fault, he’s also wildly inconsistent, untrustworthy and petulant. Used to getting whatever he wants because of his father’s trust fund and his obvious appeal to the opposite sex, he is initially amused by Ripley, but soon tires of him, preferring the company of fellow wealthy sybarite Freddie Miles (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Just about everyone’s known a Dickie at some point in their lives, the glamorous girl or boy who you’ve wanted to impress and become friends with, only to realise how desperately shallow they are when you reach their inner circle. Everyone who’s ever desperately tried to cling to the hem of ‘celebrity’ by appearing on a talent show, or by sleeping with a footballer, or doing some other degrading and tawdry thing, should be shown Law’s excellent portrayal of Dickie and asked ‘Do you really want to end up like him?’ Ironically, of course, in light of some of the more tawdry revelations about Law’s personal life that later emerged, he might have been wise to heed his own Dorian Gray-esque portrayal of corrupted beauty.

After Ripley murders Dickie in a moment that combines extremes of affection and hatred – the moment when he cradles Dickie’s head after he’s bashed it in with an oar is a uniquely disturbing touch – the film changes pace and genre, moving from a character study-cum-black comedy of manners to a more conventional crime drama. There’s enough of Highsmith’s original plotting kept intact to make this a more than satisfying Hitchcockian thriller, especially as Ripley finds himself flitting between his own, increasingly unwelcome identity and that of Dickie, sometimes virtually simultaneously, while the suspicions of Dickie’s abandoned girlfriend Marge grow. Paltrow is remarkably strong as Marge, beginning the film as the sort of cheerful, faux-bohemian expat that Fitzgerald might have lightly satirised, and ending it as a distraught and distinctly wiser figure.

Interestingly, Ripley’s grand scheme is seen through by several characters without much difficulty. He’s only saved from arrest and imprisonment – something that he at one point believes is inevitable – by a deus ex machina replacement of the investigating officer, a dramatically necessary but oddly unsatisfying moment. Yet Marge certainly realises from an early point that Ripley’s hardly the full shilling, but, in her laid-back and bohemian way, she’s happy to accept him anyway. Likewise, the loathsome Freddie Miles, himself unblessed by physical charms but no doubt similarly wealthy, sizes up Ripley as a fake more or less immediately, never losing an opportunity to belittle and dismiss him.  There’s a great scene late in the film when Miles goes to see Dickie/Ripley, and slowly begins to realise what’s going on, a revelation followed in short order by his murder. Oddly enough, it’s the only moment of violence in the film where we’re really cheering  Ripley on, in no small part due to the splendidly unctuous and insinuating performance that Seymour Hoffman gives.

Of course, Ripley’s doomed, in both the book and in the film. Highsmith chooses to end the novel (the first in a series collectively known as the Ripliad) with Ripley a wealthy man, having profited handsomely from his deceptions and connivances, but paranoid and convinced that he will be yet be exposed. Minghella, however, has a bleaker and more all-enveloping fate in store for Ripley, and it involves the expansion of a character mentioned only in passing in the book, Peter Smith-Kingsley. Played, charmingly and warmly, by Jack Davenport, Peter is the only person to have ever genuinely cared about Ripley, and his reward for this is to be Ripley’s last victim, murdered because it’s the only means of maintaining Ripley’s bogus identity as Dickie Greenleaf, with the possibility of a subsequent romantic entanglement with Meredith Logue (Cate Blanchett – oh, what a cast it has!). Minghella chooses to play the final lines of dialogue over a chilling image of Ripley sitting on a bed, presumably after he returns from dumping Peter’s body overboard on the boat that they’re sailing on, and realising that, far from becoming ‘a fake somebody’, that he’s destined to remain a real nobody all his life, no matter how many people he cons into thinking otherwise.

It’s both bracingly bleak and entirely true to the characters that Minghella has recreated, and it’s the perfect end to what has to be regarded, ultimately, as one of the strongest films of its kind ever made. Its appeal has grown, and audiences who might once have dismissed ‘the gay serial killer film’ out of hand have started to reassess it. In an amusing piece of irony, it was originally released on Christmas Day, 1999. A more unusual Christmas present is hard to imagine, but the film’s style, black wit and operatic complexity have very much proved themselves to be the gift that keeps on giving.

 

Sherlock Holmes

Given the current vogue for re-inventions of iconic characters (Batman, James Bond, Superman et al), you might have predicted what a 2009 Sherlock Holmes film might have been like quite safely, pitching it somewhere between Young Sherlock Holmes and Batman Begins. A brilliant, unfocused young man, possibly with one great tragic love affair yet to come, discovers near-uncanny powers of deduction during exotic travels, mentored by an equally brilliant mastermind, known only as ‘Moriarty’. As Holmes falls in with a recently discharged army veteran, soldier-cum-doctor John Watson, he realises that Moriarty is up to no good…

Thus the film that might have been expected, an origin story that clearly dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s of what the Holmes character did to become the legendary inhabitant of 221b Baker Street. It is probably to Guy Ritchie, Joel Silver and Robert Downey Jnr’s credit that the finished film bears no relation to this idea. Holmes here is in mid-career, having an amusingly camp relationship with his long-suffering sidekick Dr Watson (as played by an improbably dashing and fist-handy Jude Law) and a brilliant detective. Thus, when the satanic Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong, Hollywood’s villain du jour) apparently rises from the grave after his execution and promises an apocalyptic reckoning on London, it is down to Holmes and Watson to save the day.

Purists may carp – and they will – at the way that Conan Doyle’s complex, tormented detective has been simplified, even softened. Downey Jnr’s performance has echoes of his Tony Stark, even his superb performance as Harry Lockhart in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, and he’s an engaging protagonist, but in Ritchie’s envisioning of the character, he’s straightforward, a tad eccentric perhaps but an efficient man of action whose deductive skills come second to his talents with the fisticuffs. Watson is more or less the same, slightly more settled in his ways (he has a fiancee, indifferently embodied by Kelly Reilly) but handy in a fight. Strong plays a suitably vile villain, although he cannot but seem like a curtain-raiser for the inevitable appearance of Moriarty in the sequel.

It’s all good straightforward knockabout fun, capably directed by Ritchie who proves an unexpectedly dab hand at some large-scale set pieces, and with some genuinely funny lines. If it’s finally somewhat ephemeral, a tad overlong and not helped by Rachel McAdams in a largely irrelevant part as Holmes’ former paramour, it’s still a rollicking two hours of old-fashioned entertainment. And Hans Zimmer’s terrific score, making good use of weird instrumentation such as the Jew’s harp and zither, is a fantastic accompaniment. It may be out at Boxing Day, but it’s far from a turkey.