MOVIE REVIEWS
Directed by Bill Condon
Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett
SHERLOCK HOLMES never did wear a deerstalker hat. Not in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s words anyway.
The deerstalker and the Calabash pipe turned up only in the imaginations of the illustrators.
As many people have noted, to have worn a deerstalker around the streets of Victorian London would have been a social faux pas which would have made the wearer stick out like the proverbial. Something that the famously discreet Holmes would have avoided like a contaminated crime-scene.
Mr Holmes gets the hat and the pipe right, as it does much else. Holmes is commonly accepted to have been born in 1854, to have voiced a plan to keep bees in the countryside in his retirement and perhaps to write a tract on their care and qualities.
So Bill Condon’s (Gods and Monsters) vision of Holmes as a 93-year-old, living on the British south coast with his hives, his housekeeper and her young son in the summer of 1947, is an intriguing, but respectful one.
This is Holmes decades into retirement, still sharp, but with his memory – and memories – daily being eroded by age and illhealth. John Watson, Mrs Hudson, Mycroft and all the other ancillary characters are dead. Holmes seems at peace with mortality, but one last case still haunts him.
Via a trip to Japan – with a detour to the skeletal remains of the forests near Hiroshima – Holmes begins to see the importance of what he might have missed in The Case of the Lady in Grey.
It’s a gentle film this, with a pace that befits its era, which might be too contemplative to engage an audience more used to Benedict Cumberbatch’s and Jonny Lee Miller’s TV personifications (both of which are excellent, Cumberbatch’s especially so).
Sir Ian McKellen ages up from his own 76 years quite beautifully. McKellen already has some of the physiography of an old man, so with a minimum of latex, but an extraordinary attention to the details of expression, he convinces us in every scene.
Around McKellen, Laura Linney is fine as Holmes’ longsuffering housekeeper, while Milo Parker is very good as her young son Roger.
I walked into Mr Holmes wanting, I guess, a great Sherlock Holmes ‘‘case’’. But the film isn’t
Directed by Mathieu Amalric
Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett
AT A refreshingly brief 75 minutes, The Blue Room is a sporadically stunning wee French thriller that manages to maintain a slow-burning