MR. HOLMES (2015)
Directed by Bill
Condon
BBC Films, 104
minutes, PG-13
* * ½
It took me a while to view Mr. Holmes because I'm among those who think that Sherlock has been
done and redone so often there's nothing left to say. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's
creation is said to be the most portrayed fictional character of all time.
Holmes has appeared in comic strips, video games, manga, offbeat comedies,
stage, radio shows, screen, and television. There has been a Greek version of
Sherlock and, more recently (speaking of overdone!) a zombie Holmes.
Conan Doyle wrote four novels and 57 short stories between
1887 and 1927, with a ten-year break (1893-1903) in which Holmes allegedly died alongside his arch-enemy, Moriarty, at Reichenbach Falls. Blame the hiatus; in 1889,
Connecticut actor William Gillette honed an act that gave us most of what
became Basil Rathbone's shtick (pipe, deerstalker hat, cape, cocaine use,
gruffness). Holmes knock-off novels appeared, the first penned by J. M. Barrie
of Peter Pan fame! This is to say
that Holmes was re-imagined even before his creator resurrected him in 1903 in The Return of Sherlock Holmes.
Excuse the diversion, but the Sherlock back-story is more
interesting than Mr. Holmes the film–a
much better idea than movie. In the film, it's 1947 and Holmes (Ian McKellen) has
just returned from Japan, where he called upon Tamiki Umezaki (Hiroyuki Sanada)
to procure some prickly ash, whose boiled sap was believed to improve memory.
Holmes desperately needs help on that score, as he is 93-years-old and
suffering from memory loss bordering on dementia. Nice premise—imagine the
world's keenest, most rational mind being unable to recall basics, let alone nuanced
detail. With prickly ash secured–from
the charred ruins of Hiroshima–Holmes goes back to Sussex, where he has spent
the past 30 years tending bees in his retirement. The film script is adopted
from Mitch Cullin's novel, A Slight Trick
of Mind, but Conan Doyle was the source for this detail; he too had Holmes collecting
honey in Sussex.
Homes tends to his bees and Mrs. Munro (Laura Linney), a
World War II widow tends to his cottage in a role that's essentially a
countrified version of Baker Street's Mrs. Hudson. The twist is that the
semi-literate Munro has a whip-smart young son, Roger, who is more attracted to
what's left of Holmes' once-sharp mind than to his mother's forever-dull one.
You could probably predict where this is heading, and you'd be right. Among the
many problems of Mr. Holmes is the
utter conservatism of the plot. It spins off another common trope: that
Sherlock Holmes and his cases, as publicly perceived, were largely the product
of Dr. Watson's literary license. Ninety-three-year-old Holmes isn't the man in
the books, though he was a very clever detective who now has unfinished
business: remembering what it was about his final case that made him put down
his magnifying glass and set up an apiary.
Sherlock the detective would have spotted this logical
inconsistency in a New York minute. Surely he knew the answer to this mystery
the moment he retired, and if he truly wanted to expiate guilt, he wouldn't
have waited until he was 93! Instead we get flashback sequences as recovered
memory that takes us back to the Edwardian age and a muffed attempt to resolve
the case of why Thomas Kelmot (Patrick Kennedy) is being deceived by his wife,
Ann (Hattie Morahan). It is stitched, with rather large clumsy sewing, to a
mystery of why Holmes' bees are dying, his attempt to recover his memory, and
young Roger's assistance in helping him do so. Add the last detail to the
discard pile of overworked tropes: precocious young lad helps crotchety old man rediscover
joy.
Any production with McKellen and/or Linney is probably worth
watching, but let's just say you're more likely to think of Gandalf in tweed
than Sherlock Holmes in McKellen's case. Two things we know from Conan Doyle's stories–and
brilliantly captured in portrayals by Benedict Cumberbatch and Jeremy Brett (the nonpareil Holmes)–is
that Sherlock was not a nice person,
and that the misfortunes of others never induced sentimentality. Its simply too
much to ask for viewers to see Holmes as a secularized version of a tortured
ex-seminarian. McKellen's aged Holmes rings as false as another detail: on
screen it was never cloudy or rainy in Sussex, a region that features one, the
other, or both roughly two days out of three. Bah! Mr. Holmes is a sunny movie about a character whose character was
defined by tempestuousness. I wasn't moved to reconsider Holmes, nor have I
budged from the view that it's time to stop trying.
Rob Weir
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