A sterling ‘Mr. Holmes’
He never wore that “signature” deerstalker hat, nor smoked a pipe. Those were just an illustrator’s embellishments in the wildly popular, penny-dreadful accounts of his adventures penned by his late pal Dr. Watson — resulting in the cult fame that has annoyed him ever since.
Sherlock prefers a good cigar to a pipe in “Mr. Holmes,” whose structural conceit is that he’s burdened by his celebrity, his fading memory, and his last, 30-year-old case that he tried but failed to solve.
Fueled by Ian McKellen’s
magnificent performance in the title role, this latest rendering of Arthur Conan Doyle’s immortal detective is set in the 1947 Sussex village to which Holmes long ago retired. He has just returned there from a trip to post-Hiroshima Japan, in search of a prickly-ash potion said to have curative powers for senility.
“I’m in the middle of a project, and my wits must be at their sharpest,” he says, but only fragments of the old case remain with him: an angry husband who hires him to investigate a wife’s suspected infidelity; a cryptic bond between Holmes and the man’s beautiful but unstable wife; disconnected details recalled or reconstructed in flashbacks.
His short-suffering housekeeper (Laura Linney) has a 10-year-old, detective-in-themaking son named Roger (Milo Parker). Holmes doesn’t like kids. He’s much fonder of bees. But he needs help tending to his apiary — and to the mystery he’s still trying to unravel. Precocious Roger is the sole candidate for that position.
“Exceptional children are often the products of unremarkable parents,” he tells the boy’s mom in one of many backhanded compliment-insults. Now as always, he notices and processes everything at a glance, even as he must write people’s names on his shirt cuffs in order to remember them.
Director Bill Condon and actor McKellen collaborated previously — and brilliantly — on “Gods and Monsters” (1998), a gorgeous character study of “Frankenstein” films creator James Whale. The basic elements of “Gods” are strikingly similar to those of this Holmes pic: a brilliant man alone at the end of his life, afraid of losing his mind, attended by a no-nonsense domestic, with a quietly deliberate pace and an exquisite re-creation of time and place. Mr. McKellen got an Academy Award nomination and Mr. Condon won the Oscar for his screenplay adaptation of it.
The adaptation at hand, based on Mitch Cullin’s novel “A Slight Trick of the Mind,” is not as adept but has wonderful moments:
“You ever been bitten?” Roger asks warily, when Holmes opens a hive and the drones swarm out.
“Stung,” he corrects. “Bees don’t have teeth.”
But Sherlock does — even if they’re false.
Mr. McKellen, 76, plays Holmes at 60 and 90 with equal majesty, his great rheumy blue eyes, huge ears and age-spotted hands giving him an uncanny resemblance to the late great John Gielgud these days. It’s a veritable master class of acting as he evolves into Roger’s father figure, while young Parker — with his adorable diastema! — turns in a natural, delightful performance of his own.
On the other hand, Ms. Linney (whom Mr. Condon worked with in “Kinsey”) is miscast here in an effort to avoid Sherlock’s Mrs. Hudson housekeeper stereotype of yore.
Tobias Schliessler’s cinematography frames the English countryside of Kent and East Sussex at its best, and the production design features great shelves of chemicals and bottles in Sherlock’s study (and a copy of “Colloquial Malay” in his library).
Director Condon’s screenplay adaptations of the “Chicago” and “Dreamgirls” Broadway musicals — along with his “Twilight Saga” entries and “Fifth Estate,” the Julian Assange story — have been justly praised. His “Mr. Holmes” lacks the flashiness of, say, “The Seven Percent Solution” (1976), in which Sherlock (Nicol Williamson) meets Sigmund Freud (Alan Arkin).
No such tongue-in-cheekiness here. This entry is serious to the point of somber. Its Japanese element never quite clicks convincingly, and there’s too much sentimental melodrama re: Roger’s mom and dead dad.
But it’s a refreshingly original take on Sherlock in a contemplative, minor key and — if not wholly satisfying — an elegant piece of work, often touching and intriguing, about a flawed man and his painful aging process.
(Tangential bulletin! Have you seen the superb CNN documentary on Glen Campbell’s final tour? If not, and if you care about loved ones — real or fictional — suffering from geriatric dementia, you should make it a point to watch it.)
Sherlock wants to leave this life with a sense of completion. He engages his emotional powers as his mental faculties decline. You can deduce all the facts with your mind, but you may need your heart to grasp their significance.