MOVIE REVIEW : SPIELBERG IS RED HERRING IN ‘HOLMES’

“Young Sherlock Holmes” (citywide) is a charming conceit, bringing Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson together as schoolboys in the London of 1870. It is a sumptuously, expertly designed picture with a rich Dickensian flavor that feels particularly appropriate at Christmastime. And these two boys are the best casting you could imagine: 6-foot-plus Nicholas Rowe as the hawk-nosed, faintly melancholy Sherlock and the utterly endearing Alan Cox as Watson, who may have a weakness for one cream bun too many.

They head an impeccable cast featuring the cream of British character actors playing mutton-chopped men with names like Waxflatter or Cragwitch or Bentley Bobster and women called Mrs. Dribb. (Of the lot, Freddie Jones is probably the best known to American audiences.) Obviously screenwriter Chris Columbus (“Gremlins,” “Goonies”) took great care with meaningful character detail for Holmes, Watson, et al., and director Barry Levinson has evoked the era with a properly Victorian tinge of melodrama. (His staging of a chase through the dark, snowy London streets with the boys’ shadows skimming along the snow as they pursue a carriage is hauntingly effective.)

So when a project this expert falls apart before your eyes, it hurts. And fall it does, about halfway through, when Sherlock meets Spielberg, the movie’s co-producer, and deductive reasoning gets lost in a welter of secret-society rituals and Sat-mat bunkum. It’s a terrible loss, because the film stops being something to fascinate everyone and becomes Indiana Jones redux.

You could certainly make a case for sequences about deadly Egyptian cults flourishing below cobblestone level in a Holmes story--that sort of grand malarkey fascinated Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, too. The problem is that as it’s weighted in “Young Sherlock,” it runs off with the movie and throws it terribly out of scale. The fun of the film isn’t watching hundreds of shaven-headed, chanting, swarthy bad ‘uns prepare a hapless girl for mummification with a hot paraffin dip; it’s watching the little gray cells at work, to mix detectives for a moment.

And because our heroes, joined by the willowy, sloe-eyed Elizabeth (Sophie Ward) as the professor’s niece who becomes Sherlock’s chaste beloved, are so interesting and so deftly played that we want more quiet time with them. Although both young actors are fine, you might put a wager on 15-year-old Cox as being at the start of a remarkable career. His control and straightforwardness of character make the young Watson positively glow.

The story sets the country-reared, unworldly Watson down at school at London (if Watson’s voice, as our adult narrator, has a richly familiar ring, it is Michael Hordern’s). There his chief dormitory mate is a lanky and decidedly odd duck, struggling with the violin when Watson first encounters him. The chemistry of these scenes, with Watson as the faintly bumbling and homesick new boy and Holmes his instant protector/mentor, is lovely.

The plot machinations concern a group of elderly London gentlemen who die (before our eyes, have no doubt) after horrifying hallucinations. The nastiness strikes close to home as young Elizabeth’s uncle seems to be an intended victim: the eccentric Professor Waxflatter (Nigel Stock), he of the deerstalker cap and St. Nicholas whiskers. Waxflatter is nothing if not a dogged inventor. The brief, hysterical flights of his foot-pedaled flying machine from the school’s towers are commonplace occurrences to all the boys, gawking below.

It’s such richnesses of texture as this Heath Robinson-style flying machine, Holmes’ first triumphs of deduction and character being molded before our eyes that stamp the film as something special. Holmes learns “never to replace discipline with emotion” from his gimlet-eyed fencing teacher (Anthony Higgins). And in the dark-paneled dining hall, each table lit by a single candle, talk turns to what each boy wants to be when he grows up. “I never want to be alone,” is Holmes’ grave answer, startling from what we know of him as a man. Now we must learn what caused the shift.

The film’s details are brilliant: Norman Reynolds did “Return to Oz’s” richly evocative production design and equals that here. Raymond Hughes’ costumes are a joy, including a jackal-headed high-priests’ headdress that seems to have walked straight out of a case at the British Museum.

Cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt most recently did “The Cotton Club” and “The Hunger”; all his lighting is beautiful, but he has one shot, of the boys swirling down the school’s circular staircase, taken from below, which gives the scene the design of a chambered nautilus. Kit West, in charge of the singularly nasty visual effects that plague the victims, does only too startlingly well. (The stained-glass warrior who comes to life--a particularly effective computer-generated effect--is, among other such surprises, by the redoubtable wizards at Industrial Light and Magic.)

But the Spielberg touch is becoming a decidedly mixed blessing, and here it has run amok with a fascinating story idea. It’s a cautionary example: You can almost imagine a young writer or director with a nice, chewy screenplay about character and relationships--with just a soupcon of action there in the third act--thinking twice before turning it over to Amblin Entertainment. Well, almost.