Sherlock Holmes will never die as the television actors reinventing him as a modern day character attest.
But had he been real Holmes, could have conceivably lived through the first half of the 20th century and seen the invention of radio, watched films about himself and lived through World War II.
That is the premise of “Mr. Holmes,” in which the 93-year old sleuth lives out his days on a farm where he tends bees, still haunted by his final case 35-years earlier.
His misanthropy and analytic tendencies have calcified into a profound melancholy. He loses more and more of his memory each day and as he recalls bits and pieces of that final case he jots them down in a story. He must have done something terrible in it, he tells himself, to cause him to retire.
His only companions are a war widow, a Mrs. Hudson type, and her precocious jug-eared son. But bees – the boy helps him tend the hives – are his only friends.
He even wrote a book about a special honey and a Japanese reader invited him to that country after the war to search for a plant with reputed healing powers. These elements float through his life and mind, unrelated to each other except in ways that only a renowned detective, or novelist, could deduce.
Holmes is played by Ian McKellen, looking older than Gandalf with liver spots and rheumy eyes. His gruff fondness for the boy, played by Milo Parker, feeds a hunger in each of them. But Laura Linney is not believable as an Irish housekeeper or mother.
Screenwriter Mitch Cullin adapted his novel “A Slight Trick of the Mind” and “Dream Girls” and “Twilight” saga director Bill Condon, working without the budget or spectacle of those films, creates a work of complex introspection.
The result reminiscent of Condon’s 1998 film “Gods and Monsters,” for which McKellen received his first of two Oscar nominations.
*** Three stars
With Ian McKellen, Laura Linney, Milo Parker, Hiroyuki Sanada,Hattie Morahan, Patrick Kennedy, Roger Allam. Written by Mitch Cullin. Directed by Bill Condon. Rated PG some disturbing images. Approximate running time 104 minutes.
Tags: Ian McKellen, Sherlock Holmes Posted by