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SCREEN OF THE CRIME, by Lenny Picker

Not a Cardboard Box(er), or How Making Moriarty a Champion Pugilist in Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows Won Me Over To This Nontraditional Movie Series

Caveat: As an anti-spoiler partisan who has written on the subject for Publishers Weekly (“Spoil the Plot, Or Spare the Riled,” to promote myself shamelessly), I have decided to write this review in two parts—the first, without spoilers, the second, with some plot developments discussed in detail, for the many readers of Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine who will have seen the film by the time this column appears in print.

Part I

Color me astonished. I had reservations about Guy Ritchie’s first Sherlock Holmes film, although I found aspects of it appealing. For all the efforts to find Canonical proof texts justifying that movie’s depiction of Holmes more as an action hero than a quiet, patient thinker, both on the part of its production team and reviewers, it’s clear that while that’s an interesting reinterpretation of the Master, the emphasis should be on the “re.” That’s not just me; the DVD actually labels one of its special features, Sherlock Holmes Reinvented. Just as transforming Holmes into a Victorian Nero Wolfean (or Mycroftian) armchair reasoner distorts the character, making him a more intelligent precursor to James Bond, or a less affluent one than Bruce Wayne, also does so. I have generally been open to most variations on the character, from Christopher Plummer’s appropriately-passionate and emotional portrayal in Murder by Decree in the face of corruption and horrific violence, to Nicol Williamson’s paranoid cocaine addict in The Seven-Percent-Solution, and Benedict Cumberbatch’s game-changing 21st century Sherlock. But 2009’s Sherlock Holmes left me unsatisfied, and making Irene Adler into Holmes’s Catwoman didn’t quite do it for me.

So it was with considerable surprise—and pleasure—that I emerged from a screening of Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows very, very impressed. Parts of it were so well done that the movie has cracked my top-10 Holmes movie list (a ranking that does not include television adaptations such as the best of the Brett series, The Patient’s Eyes, or Sherlock, and the subject of a future column). Let’s be clear—this is not a return to the Holmes and Watson of the two Rathbone and Bruce films properly set in the Victorian era by any means. But this time, the extended fight scenes and campy exchanges between characters do not dominate. Instead, they take a back pew to one of the most, if not the most, compelling depictions, in any media, of the duel of the Titans that culminated in the Canon’s “The Final Problem.”

That is due to several elements, most notably an intelligent script that, plot- and pacing-wise, is much superior to the 2009 one, and Jared Harris’s knockout characterization of the Napoleon of Crime. Faithful readers (if any, besides my long-suffering wife Chana) will recall that my last column discussed the challenges of presenting a Holmes-Moriarty battle of wits onscreen without changing the disgraced academic into more of a bloody hands-on master-criminal. Writers Michele and Kieran Mulroney, whose previous credits are unfamiliar to me (Paper Man, or Sunny and Share Love You, anyone?) surmount all of them. (Especially-meaningless trivia: Kieran, who also acts, will be familiar to Seinfeld fans as “Timmy,” whose line, to George Costanza, “You double-dipped the chip!” has entered popular culture.) The Mulroneys did so by not only incorporating dialogue straight from the Canon into Holmes and Moriarty’s scenes together, but expand on the few glimpses of this influential and memorable villain in ways that not only suit the series’s (and medium’s) bias towards physical activity, but even eliminate a logical weakness in “The Final Problem” as Watson recounted it. More on that below.

No one before, to my knowledge, has truly tried to make the Professor an evil mirror-image of Holmes. This Moriarty is, like his archrival, a music buff devoted to opera. (One of the movie’s emotional highpoints occurs during a performance in Paris of Don Giovanni.) His ability to anticipate and forestall Holmes’s countermoves is impressively conveyed, and he remains several steps ahead of Holmes for much of the film. And, in an acceptable departure from Canon, the Mulroneys’ Moriarty is still an active professor, a choice that makes his reputation as an upstanding citizen against whom Holmes has theories, but no proof, more comprehensible. Beyond that, we are shown the author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid lecturing, as well as autographing copies of his lecture notes.

Moreover, their Moriarty actually has an organization at his disposal, with Colonel Sebastian Moran as his able second-in-command. So, the Professor can sit back and plan for the most part, allowing others to do his dirty work, consistent with the role of the Canonical Moriarty.

Speaking of which, decades ago, I was troubled by the rationale behind the Moriarty of “The Final Problem’s” choice to engage Holmes in physical combat at the Reichenbach Falls. He knew Holmes was an expert in baritsu, and his superior in the martial arts (and the other relevant “limits” he could have picked up on from a perusal of a certain 1887 Christmas Annual). Nor was Moriarty forced into a battle to the death because he had no one left to fight for him. Recall Holmes’s words to a stunned Watson in “The Empty House” to explain the great hiatus—“I knew that Moriarty was not the only man who had sworn my death. There were at least three others whose desire for vengeance upon me would only be increased by the death of their leader. They were all most dangerous men.” So, Moriarty knew that not only Moran had his back, but at least two others did as well. Why then, not have one of them give Holmes a fatal shove into the churning waters, if not pick him off from a safe distance with an airgun?

A much younger Lenny Picker speculated, as have others, that the Moriarty at Reichenbach was not the Moriarty, but a physically-superior impersonator. But the Mulroneys display their feel for the characters, and the spirit of the Canon, by making their Moriarty, who, like Downey’s Holmes, is younger than usually presented (only Vincent D’Onofrio’s criminal Napoleon in A Case of Evil was a younger man), the Cambridge boxing champion. By doing so, they continue the mirroring motif, and make it logical that the hyper-rational Moriarty would actually launch an assault on Holmes. (More on that in Part II, for those who’ve seen the movie). And they nicely set up the ending by having the famous first meeting between the arch-rivals occur in Moriarty’s university office rather than at Baker Street.

The best-conceived and executed script in the world would be to no avail if the actor didn’t fit the role. Fortunately, Jared Harris, son of the late Richard Harris (who played a Pinkerton agent infiltrating the Molly Maguires in the movie of that name), knocks it out of the park. Harris was a surprise choice for some, as better-known names were floated online, including Brad Pitt, Daniel Day-Lewis, Gary Oldman, and Javier Bardem. But it’s hard to imagine anyone doing better. For me, Harris is right up there with Eric Porter, Michael Pennington, and George Zucco, conveying both menace and brilliance with subtlety and feeling.

Game of Shadows is more than Moriarty, of course. Jude Law continues to succeed as the “man of action” that Holmes dubs Watson in The Hound of the Baskervilles. His wedding to Mary Morstan is shown onscreen for perhaps the first time. Stephen Fry is as logical a Mycroft for our times as Robert Morley was in the 1960s. And, Downey’s Holmes grew on me. Since this is a sequel, I was prepared for his manic portrayal that doesn’t stint on Holmes’s eccentricities.

The overall plot—Holmes trying to pull off the crowning achievement of his career by bringing the Professor to book—works. To those readers turned off by the first film, I say, give this one a chance, and perhaps, you, like me, will be pleasantly surprised, and eager to see how Sherlock Holmes 3 turns out.

Part II

Reminder—for those of you who passed lightly over my opening caveat—this section will reveal plot surprises that deserve to be experienced first by watching the movie.

As should be apparent by now, the movie works for me as a really good and intricate Holmes-Moriarty duel. The stakes are made plain early on, as Irene Adler, who worked for Moriarty in the first film, arranges to lunch with him in a very public place as a safety precaution after a botched assignment. But at a prearranged signal, all the other patrons empty the restaurant, leaving a poisoned Adler to collapse and expire without witnesses other than Moriarty and Moran.

Both Moriarty’s disclosure of her fate to Holmes, and Watson’s discovery of it, are masterfully handled—underplayed by the actors in a way that only makes the scenes stronger. That emotional undercurrent, absent in the first film, where Adler became, in part, a clichéd damsel-in-distress who needed rescuing from being sawed in half, is sustained, albeit with some interludes that are farcical rather than moving. The end, with the fatal tussle over the Reichenbach Falls was moving, an emotion not something I’ve generally associated with Holmes films, Murder by Decree notwithstanding.

And this Moriarty is no genteel criminal, as he’s sometimes been portrayed, but a cruel sadist who doesn’t mess around. In both The Woman In Green and Hands of A Murderer, Watson is lured away from 221B so the Professor can talk with Holmes without interruption, and returns unscathed once the conversation is over. This Moriarty, on learning that Holmes will not stand aside, torments Holmes by warning him that both the good Doctor and his new bride are fair game, despite Watson’s intended retirement from crime-fighting. “The laws of celestial mechanics dictate that when two objects collide there is always damage of a collateral nature,” the Professor observes, immediately before revealing that a rare form of tuberculosis has brought Irene Adler’s life to an untimely end. And he doesn’t hold back, sending a platoon of soldiers with tons of guns to shoot up the Watsons’s railway carriage. His ultimate threat when his plans for a destabilizing political assassination at a peace summit are derailed, to find a creatively painful way to end the Watsons’s lives, is again in keeping with an organized criminal leader responsible for immense human suffering, rather than a gentleman crook who plays by the rules.

Again, the lion’s share of the credit for the film working as well as it did belongs to the writers. In an interview, the Mulroneys shared that apart from the producers giving them a bare plot concept—“taking the story outside London to the Continent and introducing the Moriarty character”—the story came from them. Even after others weighed in, the plotline “didn’t really change from the first draft to the shooting script. What developed were the character relationships, the dialogue, of course, and the layering in of clues and details.”

As to making Moriarty a boxing champion, the writers “knew from the outset that Moriarty must be Holmes’s equal in intellectual terms, as he is in Doyle’s books. Since our Holmes is a very physically capable character—a master of baritsu, also inspired by the books—we felt Moriarty should also possess great fighting prowess. Otherwise Holmes could too easily kick his behind! Both Guy Ritchie and Robert Downey are martial arts and boxing fanatics, so they led the charge to give Moriarty a boxing background. We very much wanted him to hide this skill set from Holmes until he absolutely needed to use it in their final confrontation. Holmes being Holmes, of course, he is one step ahead and knows of Moriarty’s boxing past. So he is prepared mentally for what Moriarty throws at him.”

Despite the mirror-imaging, the Mulroneys decided to differentiate Holmes and Moriarty in a more subtle way. “We wanted him to be a man of few words—as a counterpoint to Holmes’s loquaciousness.”

By succeeding in their goal of writing a “searingly intelligent, cold-blooded villain, who was both ruthless, unflappable, and for whom the game itself was almost as thrilling as the outcome,” the Mulroneys provided material to match Harris’s considerable gifts, and have set a standard that future Holmes-Moriarty duels, both on screen, and in print, must exert themselves to surpass.

Unfortunately from my point of view, but fortunately for them, the Mulroneys won’t be back for the third Downey/Law film, as they are occupied with several other projects. They will be followed by British writer, Drew Pearce, who is also scripting Downey’s third outing as Iron Man. With the Professor dead at the bottom of the Reichenbach Falls, creating a formidable adversary for Holmes next time will not be easy; while “the second most dangerous man in London,” does survive Game of Shadows, the Mulroneys’s version, much like the Canonical one, is more of a skilled hired gun, than an evil mastermind. And if Moriarty can be plausibly made into a man of action when needed, the same cannot be said for “the worst man in London,” Charles Augustus Milverton. One of the other Moriarty brothers, perhaps? Or perhaps there was a second survivor of the fall into “that dreadful cauldron of swirling water and seething foam”? Whomever it is must be more like Harris’s Moriarty than Mark Strong’s Lord Blackwood of the first film.

Will the merits of Sherlock Holmes 2 continue in its sequel, or will it seem like just a fluke? We’ll know in 2013. d

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Lenny Picker has been fascinated by Moriarty since reading “The Final Problem” at the age of thirteen, and staying up late to watch George Zucco in 1939’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. He can be reached at chthompson@jtsa.edu.