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Ian McKellen is an ageing Sherlock trying to understand his past in Mr Holmes |
Director: Bill Condon
Cast: Ian McKellen (Sherlock Holmes), Laura Linney (Mrs
Munro), Milo Parker (Roger Munro), Hiroyuki Sanada (Taiki Umezaki), Hattie
Morahan (Ann Kelmot), Patrick Kennedy (Thomas Kelmot), Roger Allam (Dr Barrie),
Phil Davis (Inspector Gilbert), Frances de la Tour (Madame Schirmer)
It’s 1946 and over 35 years since Sherlock Holmes (Ian
McKellen) last investigated a case. Living in retirement with his bees in
Devon, with his housekeeper Mrs Munro (Laura Linney) and her inquisitive son
Roger (Milo Parker), 93-year-old Holmes’ final “case” is to try and combat the
deterioration of his own mental faculties. This focuses on his attempts to
remember the details of his final case, investigating the wife (Hattie Morahan)
of a client, a case where he knows
something went terribly wrong, but cannot recall the exact details.
Condon’s film is a quiet, gentle piece which primarily
becomes a character study of the Great Detective, trying to locate the man
inside the thinking machine. This is a Holmes unlike any other, haunted by past
mistakes and scared of losing the intellectual abilities that have been his
principal purpose. Condon’s film also makes clear that much of what we know
about Holmes was a cheeky “embellishment” by Watson in his stories – from the
pipe and deerstalker to the address of 221B. This is a Holmes who failed all
his life to form personal connections, and found this problem magnified by
becoming a real-life fictional character, a person who knows no-one but is
known by everyone.
This fascinating re-evaluation of Holmes is helped by Ian
McKellen’s superb performance (in his second collaboration with Condon after Gods and Monsters). McKellen’s ability
to convey the intellectual sharpness of Holmes is matched by his vulnerability
and fragility as he feels those same powers begin to fail. This is a Holmes who
can still sharply deduce where someone has been from a quick analysis, but
needs to write Roger’s name on his cuff to help him remember whom he is talking
to. McKellen’s performance slowly reveals the longing for emotional connection
and his own regrets at the isolation that has dominated his own life.
The expressiveness of Ian McKellen’s eyes comes into play
here, both their capacity for joy – and this is a Holmes who takes an intense
pleasure in his own acuity – and the way McKellen is able to allow these eyes
to glaze over with forgetfulness and flashes of senility. He also forms a
wonderful bond with Milo Parker (very good, genuine and real) as Roger, the two
of them forming an odd couple relationship that also gives Holmes a beginning
of an understanding of what he has missed from a life without family and
friends.
Alongside this fascinating character study, the actual
storyline is fairly tame – but then that’s hardly the point. The modern day
plotline takes in physical and mental decline, isolation, fracturing family
bonds and post-war Japan (where Holmes travels in search of “Prickly ash” a
plant he hopes will help to counteract his mental decline). But it’s really a
quiet framework to change this Holmes into a man who sees the world only in
terms of logic and puzzles, and must learn to see the humanity and emotions
that underlie people’s actions. It’s a Holmes who must learn to appreciate
feelings, to express them and to tell “white lies” to save people from pain.
It’s no surprise that the past sequences – where a spry
McKellen also plays Holmes in his late 50s – also revolve around this. The
investigation cheekily features spiritualism (the pseudo-science that obsessed
Conan Doyle in his later days) but the real point is Holmes failing to
understand the pain and loss that underlie the desire to believe in the
possibility of life after death – that loss is a traumatic event that cannot be
hand-waved away with a presentation of facts, but a has a real lasting impact
on people. Hattie Morahan captures this wonderfully, in a quietly emotional
performance as a grieving mother.
The final resolution of this I found slightly less
satisfying – perhaps because I thought of actual “canon” stories that showed
Holmes expressing far more emotional intelligence than this film gives him the
credit for understanding here (e.g. The
Yellow Face). I’m also not sure if this failure would really have left any Holmes
punishing himself with 35 years of isolation with bees. But it fits with the
film’s concept of a Holmes who finds himself pained by loneliness.
This loneliness is hammered home throughout. Mycroft, Hudson
and Watson are long dead. Watson himself is implied to be a man who never
understood Holmes, that the “fictionalised” Holmes became more real to him than
the flesh-and-blood man. That on Watson’s part the friendship became about the
stories, with Holmes always triumphant, rather than reflecting who he was.
Holmes finds this disconnection between his inner self and the world’s
perception hammered home at every turn – at one point the film shows him
watching a Rathbone-esque film (where he is played by Nicholas Rowe, the actor
from Young Sherlock Holmes), where
the case that haunts him plays out with a traditional ease. Completing this
disconnection, Watson remains unseen in the film: a stranger whom Holmes was
tied to forever.
All this makes for a thought-provoking film, with a
delightful performance from McKellen making a truly unique and original screen
Holmes. There are a host of fabulous supporting performances – Laura Linney
does fine work as his insecure, lonely housekeeper who feels she is losing her
son to the detective – and the film is a gloriously entertaining Sunday
afternoon treat, which will make you think again about a man whom the whole
world knows, but who may not know himself.
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