Director: Bill Condon
Writers: Jeffrey Hatcher
Cast: Ian McKellen, Milo Parker, Laura Linney, Hiroyuki Sanada
Runtime: 104 mins.
2015
Mr. Holmes presents an aged Sherlock with decades standing between himself and many of the aspects of the character that we would typically consider mandatory, or at the least recognizable. Holmes (Ian McKellen), a once infamous detective, is now wiling away his life in the quiet English countryside with his caretaker (Laura Linney) and her child Roger (Milo Parker). He chafes at this lifestyle, yet has been resigned to it ever since his long distant Last Case and subsequent retirement. The trouble is, he can't remember why that final case drove him into retirement, and he doesn't trust the long-deceased Watson's fictionalized take on the matter. Sherlock Holmes is only interested in the hard truth, a difficult proposition when suffering from heavy bouts of memory loss and senility. Mr. Holmes is about an aging genius attempting to reconstruct his memories to understand an important decision he made many years ago, and he only manages to make progress with the insistent prodding of his new friend and protege, Roger.
I've just written a description of quite a sleepy plot, and the film is not much more exciting than it sounds. I managed to catch this movie on my way from one job to another, and I dozed a bit during the first act, which is something I've never done in a movie theater before. Thankfully, Bill Condon is not trying to make a twisty thriller that strangles your attention through the entire runtime. He's making a laid back story about an old man finding himself, so he can afford to make a gamble on a film that will be a bit boring until the audience is invested.
McKellen's performance is emblematic of this style of filmmaking. We've become accustomed to a heightened, flashy version of Sherlock Holmes in recent years thanks to BBC's Sherlock and Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes movies. Cumberbatch and Downey Jr. are invested in portraying the manic sociopathic energy of a hyperactive savant, and it works as far as those projects are concerned. McKellen brings something far more placid to the table, and it feels like a refreshing splash of water.* That doesn't make his performance any less impressive; McKellen treats us to his vision of Sherlock Holmes at 93 and his vision of Holmes at 63 via flashbacks. Thirty years can weigh on a man, and McKellen does an outstanding job of transforming physically, intellectually, and emotionally both within each time period and in the space between the two. If McKellen's work here doesn't warrant a Best Actor nomination, I don't know what does. (But then, I felt the same thing about Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler...)
*For those of you familiar with the Enneagram,** Sherlock Holmes is the ultimate 6--wholly dedicated to his system of deduction and therefore an efficient and proficient solver of crimes. The recent portrayals of the character have focused heavily on Sherlock's 7-wing, with Downey Jr. perhaps even abandoning the 6 for a full-on 7 (that is Downey Jr.'s type, after all, which makes him perfect for a character like Tony Stark). McKellen, however, leans into Holmes's 5-wing, which gives us a far more introspective, layered, private, and wily version of the character.
**For those of you unfamiliar with the Enneagram, ask me about it sometime.
The wealth of riches found in McKellen's performance here should come as no surprise to anyone who has seen the last team up between Condon and McKellen, Gods and Monsters. McKellen's Gandalf and Magneto were some of my favorite movie characters growing up, but Gods and Monsters features McKellen at his absolute transcendent best, so of course Condon could tease out a mesmerizing version of this admittedly overadapted character. The movie seems to be having fun with just this dynamic, as Holmes is frequently frustrated by the public's stereotypical "fictionalized" understanding of his persona. Perhaps my favorite scene in the entire movie involves Sherlock happening upon a movie theater that is playing an adaptation of one of John Watson's stories; Sherlock gazes at the melodrama on the screen with the mixture of fascination and incredulity that is the domain of sharp old men.
This is almost exclusively the McKellen show, but it's still a bummer when the rest of the cast doesn't measure up. The kid's pretty good, but I'm thinking mostly of Laura Linney as Holmes's caretaker, Mrs. Munro. The primarily scolding role isn't good on the page, but Linney does nothing to salvage it; in fact, her choices err on the side of positioning Mrs. Munro as a henpecking villain rather than an overwhelmed mother who wants what is best for her child. Her antagonistic performance collides headlong with the soft tone of the movie. It would be far more warranted if her kid was hanging around with Cumberbatch, but the last thing Condon's Mr. Holmes calls for is histrionics. I make the same complaint about the climax of the film, which uses an inelegant plot device to ratchet up the tension in a way that feels artificial and unnecessary. We got so far into the movie without any danger or suspense that it feels like the movie momentarily loses faith in itself.
Also, this movie has a bizarre fascination with bees that works in an interesting way thematically, but gets distracting when nobody stops talking about them.
These amount to fairly minor complaints because Mr. Holmes absolutely sticks the landing. As befits the sort of anti-detective movie that Condon has constructed, Holmes's arc inverts the typical Holmes paradigm in order to come to an emotional catharsis rather than a logical synthesis. Thus the plot ties in beautifully with the themes of age and memory and fiction and legacy that McKellen's character bounces around in his head for the entirety of the film.
3 / 5 BLOBS
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