Movie Review: Mr. Holmes
By Bill Wine
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Ah, Holmes sweet Holmes.
Sherlock Holmes, that is, the fictional consulting detective created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1887.
Has any screen character been portrayed more often on the movie screen – we're talking hundreds of times -- by more different actors than this brilliant sleuth living at 221B Baker Street? Dracula, maybe.
Mr. Holmes gives us the latest Sherlock, portrayed by two-time Oscar nominee Ian McKellen, up for Best Actor in 1998 for Gods and Monsters and for Best Supporting Actor in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001.
In Mr. Holmes, we look in on the frail, fabled title character at age 93, living in a cottage in Sussex, on the southern coast of England.
Tired of his own legend as a Victorian celebrity, the aging icon tending his bees has long since retired and is in failing health. With his memory fading fast, he's full of regret as he contemplates mortality, and he fears and fights off the onset of senility. But his powers of deduction remain acute.
As he visits the ruins of Hiroshima in search of an herbal medicine that will serve as a memory aid, he looks back over a lifetime as he attempts to complete a manuscript he is writing about his problematic and unsolved final case, involving a married couple, portrayed by Hattie Morahan and Patrick Kennedy in flashback, which drove him to retirement and continues to haunt him after more than three decades.
Laura Linney plays Mrs. Munro, his devoted housekeeper, a reserved war widow whose precocious son, Roger (the fine Milo Parker), is understandably curious about Holmes, who comes to take the boy under his beekeeping wing.
And, yes, we see Holmes attend a movie about himself, disapproving whimsically about the way he is being portrayed, seeing it as an even more inauthentic depiction than the elementary one in the fictionalized accounts written by his friend and chronicler, Dr. John Watson, who barely makes an appearance this trip.
What we get to see is the chasm between fact and fiction in the gap between the real and reel versions of Holmes: Deerstalker? What deerstalker? Pipe? What pipe?
The director, Bill Condon (Kinsey, Dreamgirls, The Fifth Estate, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Parts 1 and 2), who also worked with McKellen in Gods and Monsters (for which Condon won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay), has fashioned a quiet, deliberate film that holds us in its sway as it builds to a climax that promises to make sense of it all.
The script by Jeffrey Hatcher -- an adaptation of the 2005 novel, A Slight Trick of the Mind, by Mitch Cullin – adroitly juggles storylines and periods, three of each, weaving them into an elegant narrative mosaic as it explores the central character while solving a trio of low-key mysteries.
Those solutions may not be as clever or impactful as what we have come to expect in Holmes' adventures, but they help to embellish this mournful and insightful character study.
As the celebrated detective in a thirty-year span well after his prime, septuagenarian McKellen, always a sly and nimble actor, is magnificent – ho-hum – always inhabiting the character but especially when Holmes, always more interested in logic than feelings, comes to grips with distressing emotions he's kept buried for decades.
So we'll detect 3-1/2 stars out of 4 for the compelling and touching Mr. Holmes. Once again and in a thoroughly original way, the game is afoot and McKellen deserves a hand.
