Sherlock Holmes Gets Better with Age
It's 1947 and Sherlock Holmes is living in the English countryside caring for his bees. Holmes has spent the past few decades in this self-imposed exile, retired from his craft after his final case went unsolved. Aged 93, he's starting to forget things, and with the aid of his housekeeper's son, Holmes tries to recall and record the circumstances of that last case, including what it was he missed.
He wants to write this book to set the record straight. This Sherlock Holmes, played here by Ian McKellen, is the "real" Holmes. Not that deerstalker-wearing, pipe-smoking creation of Holmes' associate, the late Dr. John H. Watson.
Director Bill Condon's Mr. Holmes, based on the novel A Slight Trick of the Mind, is no cinematic adventure in the vein of Guy Ritchie and Robert Downey Jr.'s Holmes films. Nor is it the slick mystery thriller found on the BBC's Sherlock. Rather, this film is a meditation on aging, reflection, and isolation that uses the audience's familiarity with the Holmes character to tell a story about one of fiction's greatest minds as it starts to deteriorate.
Though the film lacks the traditionally clever and twisty mystery of an Arthur Conan Doyle story, the unsolved case presents just enough of a puzzle when paired with Holmes' failing memory to keep an audience engaged from beginning to end. Mr. Holmes starts slow to acquaint us with this new take on the character, as well as with housekeeper Mrs. Munro (Laura Linney) and her son Roger (Milo Parker). The 76 year-old McKellen portrays the movements, breathing, and speech of an older man with ease, and similarly brings his Holmes to life as a slightly more human, though completely familiar, individual. He is the man rather than the legend, but McKellen's Holmes more than lives up to his fictional counterpart's reputation.
Linney is excellent as Mrs. Munro, though she has little to do in the story. Her role is of the frustrated caretaker. Holmes, though still largely capable, is too troubled to live alone, yet too stubborn to become fully dependent on another. She contends with him as well as with her bright son, more educated than she and eager to learn from Holmes. Milo Parker strikes the perfect balance as Roger, playing neither the meddlesome child nor the cute, precocious sidekick. He's smart, and seems to get closer to Holmes than anyone since Watson.
Mr. Holmes offers an engrossing, if simple, mystery—as well as an intriguing subplot about Holmes' recent trip to post-War Hiroshima—but his burgeoning friendship with Roger is emblematic of the film's core. Usually presented as a brilliant sociopath, Mr. Holmes' Sherlock is instead a kind, distant man who comes to terms with the emotional needs of others, and how he can fulfill them. That such a human story can be wrapped in a Sherlock Holmes tale is what makes this film a special entry in the detective's ever-growing filmography.
Sherlock Holmes films will continue to be made, if only because of the character's enduring popularity and commercial potential, but few films will likely offer the great heart and depth of character provided by Ian McKellen and his Mr. Holmes.