Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

Only two years ago, the first of Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes films came out, a cleverly reimagined portrayal of Holmes that was less aloof, detached, robot-like genius with an occasional opium habit and more drug-addled rock star of the detective world who stumbles from case to case causing problems for all around him and cursed with the ability to make stunning insights based on tiny observations. Rather than the unmemorable Blackwood of the first film, this one seems Holmes pitted against his nemesis Moriarty, as the original cliffhanger hinted it would. This of course made for a much more interesting cat-and-mouse game, but not only is there a worry now that this amusingly alternative version of Holmes will become the mainstream (making me long for the original version to make a return), but there was also the problem of giving Moriarty a motive that would seem intriguing and personal. Beyond a vendetta against Watson established purely because Holmes tried to avert it, there’s a supposed twist in that what Moriarty is really after is to start a large-scale war which will result in huge profits for him, because he has cornered the market in weaponry and other industries associated with warfare. It’s such an overused idea that it has its own TV Tropes page – ‘War for Fun and Profit’, and the idea was cliché in Star Trek, cliché in Gundam Wing, and it’s cliché here.

Still, there wherefores are peripheral, and it’s the stylistic delivery that works here. It’s by turns funny (that poor dog!), visually striking (the slow motion sequences) and clever (it’s not what the disguised ambassador does but what he does not do that gives him away). There’s a good mixture of action, comedy and pathos and the ending is satisfactory.

There’s also the appearance of Stephen Fry as Mycroft Holmes, an excellent foil to his brother and a bit of casting that I’m sure will evoke much commentary about the irony of Fry playing Mycroft to an American acting as the British Holmes while his long-time comedy partner who is British plays a famed American TV character based on Holmes, so I won’t need to add much to it here. It also reunites him with his Wilde co-star Law. On the other hand, having read about all his various body issues and extreme lack of confidence in The Fry Chronicles, I was mostly wondering about the psychological impact of the nude scene he had on the actor, rather than having the intended reaction of ‘Look, an inappropriately naked and unsightly man, how funny.’ But then, I’ve always had hang-ups about on-screen nudity, even wit nothing revealed.

And I also had problems with both the larger plot and the details. I could accept they would infiltrate Moriarty’s arms base when they don’t really need to in order to search for Rene, but after that there seems a great leap. They know Rene is working for Moriarty, but I cannot understand how Holmes deduced that the disguised ambassador had to be him. Why could it not have been one of numerous men working for Moriarty rather than Rene himself? It wasn’t made clear.

Plus lots of details were stretched, or relied on coincidence. Would Moriarty really leave the book that was his cipher in plain view when Holmes was visiting? Could he really rely on Holmes drawing the wrong conclusion when he went to the Opera for my (everyone’s?) favourite part of Don Giovanni? Did they really have to have their final confrontation over a game of chess, that most laboured of images?

Fun, but certainly not without its flaws.

Hugo

A lot of people still react with surprise when they hear Scorsese has made a children’s film. But it’s been a very long time since Goodfellas and Casino, and he’s amply proven his versatility since. And this ought to bring home to a wider audience that he can make interesting, stylistically superb films with great affection. I suspect this’ll be the best film this Xmas.

Based on what looks like an awesome mixed-media novel, Hugo is the story of a little boy who lives in a fanciful version of Gare Montparnasse, with a grandiose façade and a tower, winding the clocks and evading the station inspector, who will send him to the orphanage if he realises his drunken uncle is no longer there to do his job. His father, a watchmaker, left him just one thing – a large automaton – and though he gathers parts to try to get it working, it needs a special key. He gets in trouble trying to steal from a toymaker, who in turn takes from him his father’s notebook. But what is in the notebook makes the toymaker hesitate, and his pretty young daughter has a very distinctive key about her neck…

All I knew going into Hugo was that it was suitable for kids, that it looked quite steampunk-ish on the poster and that somewhere along the line the Lumière brothers and Georges Méliès were involved, names familiar from my master’s degree. And indeed, this film made me glad to have got that rather useless qualification, because there was a lot of familiar stuff here. The story revolves around a fanciful version of Méliès’ life (somewhat oddly pronounced with the ‘s’ voiced here), both triumphs and tragedies exaggerated to make for a good yarn, and this allows Scorsese to not only recreate the fun setpieces of Méliès’ best (and Le Voyage dans la lune remains my very favourite piece of pre-Expressionist film footage, with its tumblers and funny effects), but to put in references to other films and famous scenes, from melding that famous the Montparnasse disaster with echoes of both Jean Renoir and the Lumière train film (and of course I had to duck away when the actual film was played, just before the onscreen audience did, in accordance with the popular urban myth) to a scene that will definitely bring to mind The 39 Steps. He even inserted Helen McRory (one of several Harry Potter cast members in this film) into original Méliès footage! Part of the love for film here seems to be Scorsese’s own.

The cast is excellent. The children are the centre of it all, of course, and do superbly – the boy playing Hugo was adorable and will make an interesting Ender. The girl – who I only later realised was Hitgirl from Kickass – was both tomboyish and feminine and managed to pull off that tired character quirk of proudly using long words because she’s bookish. Kingsley is reliably superb and ought to do more roles like this. Sasha Baron Cohen will no doubt see his stature further rise from this – he popped up in Sweeney Todd but a lot of people still don’t think of him as an actor who will appear in other people’s films. Here, he manages loathsome, ridiculous and appealing, no mean feat. McRory, Jude Law and Christopher Lee are strong in their small roles, and though reports are conflicting, I’m convinced that was Johnny Depp putting in a cameo as the guitar player.

One slightly odd point was that when Hugo put his hair in a side-parting, he looked remarkably like a friend of ours. Which had us laughing at certain points! Overall, though, this was a superb little film and the first in many years that has actually made me interested in the video game tie-in.