The melody that opens Mr. Holmes and recurs throughout sets a melancholy, reflective tone. Mr. Holmes’ Sherlock is nothing like Benedict Cumberbatch’s whip-smart young rebel or any of the familiar late-Victorian masterminds, but is a lonely old man at the end of his career and the end of his life. Ian McKellen is brilliant in both iterations as the film folds back and forth in time, playing the already aged Baker Street sleuth in 1918 and the wizened, retired country gentleman of 1947.
Mr. Holmes was adapted from Mitch Cullin’s novel A Slight Trick of the Mind and directed by Bill Condon, best known for his Twilight movies but more remarkable for his previous collaboration with McKellen, Gods and Monsters (1998), in which the great British actor portrayed director James Whale (Frankenstein) in old age. For the 1947 segments of Mr. Holmes, McKellen draws from a deep well of understanding. He fully embodies a character with the careful tread of a man unsure of his legs, feeling where once he saw clearly, still highly observant yet faltering in recollection. The endlessly long file cabinet of facts in his head is sometimes locked.
Holmes is in the early stages of dementia. With his collaborator and housekeeper, Dr. Watson and Mrs. Hudson, long dead, and his brother, Mycroft, recently deceased, time has largely left Holmes marooned in his own past. In between puttering with his bees, assisted by the bright young son (Milo Parker) of his disapproving housekeeper (Laura Linney), Holmes is trying to square Watson’s final story with the reality of the case it was based upon. One problem is that the memories he has are at best shards from a broken vessel, glimpses of the past that come to him in flashes. The other is the nature of memory itself, which can be unconsciously rewritten to adhere to what we want to remember.
Mr. Holmes is a superb evocation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s unforgotten character, probably the most universally and instantly recognized figure in world literature. It is also a meditation on the relation of fact and fiction, and how the latter is sometimes preferable. “Oh, the deerstalker, that was an embellishment of the illustrator,” he explains to a fan. “And the pipe—I prefer cigars.” With death as his somber companion, Holmes reflects on the infinite dimensions of reality and concludes, “Human nature is a mystery logic alone cannot illuminate.” A younger Holmes might be shocked if he foresaw that life would lead to such a revelation.
Mr Holmes
4 stars
Ian McKellen
Laura Linney
Directed by Bill Condon
Rated PG
