Mr. Watson, you presumed
Elderly detective tries to correct his record in Mr. Holmes
Mr. Holmes is the sort of movie that doesn’t often come around in the summertime, a sedate and ruminative affair about an old man sorting through the accumulated detritus of his almost- over life, trying to remember the details and work out whether any of it means anything.
Given the recent portrayals of Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective as a kind of steam- punk Tony Stark ( Robert Downey Jr.) and socially awkward sociopath ( Benedict Cumberbatch), it’s a relief to find him embodied in the person of Sir Ian McKellen, whose character at 93 sits by the sea in Sussex, tends his bees and suffers the attentions of his brusque housekeeper ( Laura Linney, held in reserve until near the end of the film) while instructing her young son Roger ( Milo Parker) in the dark arts of deduction and beekeeping.
The film, based on a novel by Mitch Cullin, reunites McKellen with director Bill Con-
don, who 17 years ago cast him as Frankenstein director James Whale, another man struggling with fading mental faculties, in the remarkable Gods and Monsters. This realish Holmes is caught in the no- man’s land between celebrity and legend; he’s still occasionally recognized on the street, but most people probably assume he is dead ( like Snake Plissken) or never existed beyond the pennydreadful novels his friend John Watson wrote based on their Victorian exploits. Watson was a sensationalist and an unreliable narrator — Holmes never wore a deerstalker cap, and the address Watson provided was in fact across the road from the rooms they kept. ( And Holmes gave up pipe- smoking so as not to conform to his
fictional counter- self.)
Now Watson is long dead and Holmes is long retired. It’s 1947, and Holmes is alarmed by his increasingly glitchy memory. He eats the royal jelly from his apiaries, hoping to improve it; he’s recently returned from an arduous trip to Japan where his guide dug some prickly ash, another alleged holistic memory aid, from the scorched earth of Hiroshima. ( These scenes constitute a curious and oblique breaking- in of 20th- century horror on what otherwise feels like a clever piece of period craftwork; it’s jarring to see the scars on the faces of the defeated Japanese. As the elderly Holmes pursues his private, selfish mission, occupying U. S. soldiers can be seen in the background, checking papers and policing the city. Maybe it is time for the old boy to move along.)
But the cures don’t work.
So he tries to piece together a narrative of his last case from more than 20 years before.
It started when a man approached him about his depressive wife, who, disconsolate after two miscarriages, became obsessed with playing the glass harmonica ( an instrument invented by Benjamin Franklin that has often been associated with mental illness and melancholy). After he forbade her from playing the instrument, she defied him and began leaving the house during the day. The husband engaged Holmes to find out what she was up to — but he can’t remember the rest.
Watson wrote an account of it, but Holmes knows his confederate prettied up the ending, and that he, Holmes, must have made some sort of terrible mistake. Otherwise, he deduces, it wouldn’t have been his final case. Only failure would have driven him to
retirement.
He has begun to write a memoir of the case, adding details as they occur to him. Young Roger has found his manuscript, and wants to know how the story ends. So does Holmes.
And so we get a story within the story, as a somewhat younger Holmes investigates and quickly solves a human riddle. He speaks to the straying wife, Ann Kelmot ( Hattie Morahan), uncovers her mystery and motives. In the end, he provokes heartbreak. It was only Holmes doing what he had always done, but the result was entirely unsatisfactory.
There is, at the heart of this movie, a little notion about the uses of fiction. ( For a certain kind of moviegoer, there’s a lot of metafictional fat to chew over. Holmes resents that Watson reduced him to a pipe- smoking trope. At one point Holmes goes into
a theater to watch a movie based on the novel that Watson wrote about the Kelmot case. The actor who plays the fictional “Matinee Holmes” happens to be Nicholas Rowe, who as a juvenile played the title role in Barry Levinson’s Young Sherlock Holmes in 1985.)
Holmes prefers facts and considers Watson’s inventions and exaggerations the product of a weak and sentimental mind. He sets out to set down the truth of the Kelmot affair and finally realizes the heartlessness at the core of his character. Maybe it’s never too late for Mr. Spock to embrace his human side and discover the liberating balm of storytelling.
But really, the philosophical implications are pretty slight; the best reason to see the film is McKellen’s finely calibrated evocation of a soul in revolt against a failing mind and body.