Mr. Holmes

There are certain roles and certain actors that come together and you think, "This is perfect. Why hasn’t this happened before now?" So it is with Sir Ian McKellen and Sherlock Holmes. I am surprised, in his long and varied career playing everything from Richard the Third to Gandalf, that no one has ever matched McKellen’s intelligence and winking, sly wit with the world’s greatest detective. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Sherlock Holmes is one of the most filmed fictional characters in history with over 250 different versions, but only just now are getting Bill Condon’s wonderful, compassionate Mr. Holmes. 

Perhaps the movie gods were just waiting for McKellen to be old enough. Mr. Holmes is the story of the great detective as an old man. 93 to be exact. He lives in the remote Sussex countryside in post-World War II England, having left London more than thirty years before. He tends his prize bees and frustrates his housekeeper, Mrs. Monroe, played by Laura Linney. He spends time with Mrs. Monroe’s son, Roger, who has a clear intelligence and powers of observation in line with Sherlock himself.

The main conflict of the film is Holmes trying to remember and write down the particulars of his final case in London. He says he never liked John Watson’s “fictionalized” versions of their adventures together and wants to write one the way it actually happened, particularly the last one because, even though he can’t remember it all, he knows something happened in it that made him leave London and his profession forever. The only problem is, at 93, Holmes’s memory is spotty and failing at best. For once, all the clues to the mystery are hidden in the great detective’s own mind. Sherlock struggles with his failing powers as Roger struggles with knowing that he’s already smarter and more educated than his housekeeper mother.

McKellen gives us a human, compassionate Sherlock Holmes, quite the opposite of the brusque super-brain of Benedict Cumberbatch’s popular contemporary tv version. He’s an old man who is full of regrets but doesn’t necessarily remember what he regrets. McKellen is only 76 in real life but he successfully plays Holmes in his 60s in London flashbacks and, thanks to makeup and a tremendous performance, as a decaying old man in his 90s.

Milo Parker, the young actor who plays Roger, does a terrific job conveying real intelligence mixed in with hero worship, naiveté, and resentment for his mother. His relationship with Holmes is fun to watch as the old man allows the boy to prod his memory and tell him more of the story of his last case. 

The film’s only weak link is Laura Linney as Mrs. Monroe. Of course, Linney is talented but her performances always strike me as brittle and self-conscious. Next to a performer as organic and joyful as McKellen, she seems calculating and a little flat. But it’s a minor distraction from an otherwise really lovely film.

Mr. Holmes is an elegy, a kind of cinematic poem of mourning. It’s about how we lose things – people we love, the innocence that existed before war, our certainty that we know how people are and how the world works, our memories, sometimes even just our ability to get out of bed on our own without falling over.  To watch the great Sherlock Holmes, a kind of proto-superhero whose power was the ability to remember everything, struggle to recall a name or an event, reminds me that everybody declines eventually. It’s part of being human.

While the film is melancholy to be sure, it is ultimately an affirmation that, even though people die and our abilities decay, we can honor who we have lost and take pleasure in the joys of the present moment. Mr. Holmes is a beautiful film and deserves to be seen. 

This review originally appeared on Q90.1 Delta College Quality Public Radio. For more information, go to www.deltabroadcasting.org.