The Dark Prince of Detective Work

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The New York Sun

Right from the opening shot of Sherlock Holmes inhaling a nefarious substance in murky circumstances, you know you’re not going to change the channel on PBS’s “Masterpiece Theatre” this time, just because of its eternal insistence on that smug sounding moniker. Like most of its offerings, “Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking” isn’t a masterpiece by any means. But it is a reminder of how much fun creative people can have when freed of the requirement to find seven appropriate places in a two-hour movie to break for a Toyota commercial.


What sets this Holmes story apart isn’t just its clever story – a fresh one from writer Alan Cubitt, not an adaptation of an Arthur Conan Doyle novel – but also its clever casting of an actor liberated from the traditional constraints of the Holmes persona. Rupert Everett, the gangly British actor best known to Americans for his comic turns in “My Best Friend’s Wedding” and “Shakespeare in Love,” found the most entertaining mystery to be Sherlock Holmes himself, and devotes himself to unraveling it. Like others before him – most notably the director Billy Wilder, whose “Private Life of Sherlock Holmes” probed the detective’s possible gay leanings – Mr. Everett focuses his particular attention on the interior landscape of Holmes. But unlike Wilder’s 1970 film starring Robert Stephens, Mr. Everett (an openly gay actor) chooses, wisely I think, to keep Holmes’s sexual preferences out of this story. As he unravels this tricky knot of a crime, Mr. Everett portrays a man infatuated more by murderers than men or women – and ends up with a rich performance that beats anything Basil Rathbone had to offer.


The year is 1903, and a retired Holmes – bored and frustrated by his old pal Watson’s impending marriage – is persuaded by Watson to help Scotland Yard figure out who killed a young prostitute found in the Thames. Watson, it seems, may be fearful that Holmes is slipping into the jaws of drug addiction and offers the crime as a possible distraction. (Mr. Everett, an admitted heroin user in his youth, plays Holmes’s stoned-out appearance to perfection.) As always, the Scotland Yard investigators have failed to figure out anything of significance, and it’s Holmes who reluctantly takes a look at the corpse and finds a silk stocking stuffed down her throat – and evidence that she’s no street girl, but rather a member of the English upper class. It’s a great moment, and you can see the glint in Holmes’s eye as he delights himself with his own powers of deduction. The killings continue, and with a baffling twist: Each new victim wears the clothes of the previous one.


The story that unfolds gives Mr. Everett a remarkable opportunity to play Holmes in a way never attempted before, as a dark prince of detective work. There’s no joy in evidence here; if anything, Mr. Everett delivers a Holmes bereft and weakened by years of drug abuse and repetition. That’s what makes this so satisfying. It’s not just another episode of “Columbo,” with Peter Falk showcasing those trademark ticks for the hundredth time; it’s a wholly original interpretation, with Holmes’s dour personality perfectly fitting this low point in his career. His engagement with the case builds steadily until, by the end, it reaches a frenzy; Holmes, and only Holmes, sees the answer that baffles Londoners and the police. The class issues that form the backdrop here – the reluctance of the rich to acknowledge the nature of the crime, aimed directly at their young wives – only adds a dimension to a plot already thick with subtext and subtlety.


The folks behind “Masterpiece Theatre” hope that this edgy and clever twist on the Holmes saga will attract new viewers to an enterprise most viewers associate with stodgy stories set in English drawing rooms. They’re right to be hopeful. The days of Alistair Cooke sitting in an easy chair with a snifter of brandy (or am I imagining the snifter?) have been replaced, at least here, by smart casting, good writing, and a plot that beats most network thrillers. If this is what happens when public television panders to the mainstream audience, then I hope it continues. Ditch “Desperate Housewives” this Sunday night at 9 – or, more to the point, Holmes wannabe Vincent D’Onofrio on “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” – and see what Rupert Everett is smoking.


***


I know this sounds weird, but I thought Comedy Central’s new 11:30 p.m. series, “The Colbert Report,” was actually too funny – not “too funny” as in “too, too funny” but actually, just, too funny. I want it to get a little less funny. Right now it’s the comedy equivalent of a huge slice of cheesecake.


The problem is that every word out of Mr. Colbert’s mouth comes tinged with so much amusement and irony and wit that this may become hard to sustain. The first few episodes already alternate between moments of deep hilarity and stretches of tired repetition. Unlike his former home, “The Daily Show,” here Mr. Colbert must be intentionally comical. The result is that too much of the show depends on “jokes,” and not enough on the deadpan on-scene reporting he so brilliantly executed in service to Jon Stewart. Best moment so far: the “gravitas” competition between Mr. Colbert and NBC anchor Stone Phillips, intoning teases from beyond the pale. (“If you’ve ever sat naked on a hotel bedspread,” Mr. Phillips tossed off effortlessly, “we have a chilling report you won’t want to miss.”)


Tone it down. Hire some reporters. Move the camera around. Invite people who aren’t television journalists to be guests. I don’t want to get sick of Stephen Colbert quite so fast. He’s too funny.


dblum@nysun.com


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