The inquisitive young boy is intrigued by the ace detective and the lonely old man is welcoming of the companionship, much to the chagrin of Roger’s mother who fears Sherlock is a bad influence on the impressionable lad. It’s like they chose to take the Sherlock Holmes that Robert Downey, Jr. made for this generation, and turn him into a beekeeper like Peter Fonda played in Ulee’s Gold (a much better film). “Mr. Holmes” also has the benefit of being rated PG, so bring the kids without fear.
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As ever, this Holmes, played by Sir Ian McKellen with a grand, doddering impatience, has no time for nostalgia, imagination and sentiment, “commonplace” things. Rather, it’s a self-imposed exile of quiet torment, coming some 30 years after the case that prompted him to hang up his magnifying glass once and for all.
The film splits into thirds to cover all of this ground.
Sherlock’s inability to recall the events of the case clearly infuriates him and he becomes obsessed with solving the case before he meets his maker. The great detective is alone, save for his housekeeper and her young son.
The case itself, unfortunately, is fairly immaterial. You can nearly feel his back pain, so shocking is his subtle and wondrous transformation into a Holmes in his 90s.
Not having read Mitch McCullin’s 2005 novel A Slight Trick of the Mind, deftly adapted for the movie by Jeffrey Hatcher, I can’t tell whether the author meant to close the door at last on the endlessly renewable line of Sherlocks. Historically, Holmes’s appeal has in part been his inaccessibility: his cool detachment and formidable intelligence have led audiences to admire and marvel at his superhuman attributes. Mr. Holmes doesn’t have the same emotional power or visual style as McKellen’s and director Bill Condon’s 1998 collaboration Gods and Monsters, but it’s a similarly sensitive character study of an aging icon. It’s evenly directed but Condon’s presence is fairly anonymous. He is so highly and rightly revered for his gravity, good humor and impeccable instincts, and he seldom lets down his reputation in any tangible way. And in McKellen in the title role, Mr. Holmes is a tender, whimsical mystery that lands somewhere between myth and memory. He does not embody the easy and prickly confidence of the detective that was embodied by Basil Rathbone in the 1940s.
Sherlock Holmes is one of fiction’s most enduring characters because of his fascinating idiosyncrasies. But McKellen’s work is enough to make this a notable addition to the more than 250 Sherlocks captured on film over the years.
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We first see Holmes, played by Ian McKellen, in the last stage of life, returning to his home in the south of England after a trip to Japan. “Ian and I have known each other for a long time but we’ve never worked together so that was an added bonus”. Mr. Holmes has moments of palpable regret and loss, but visually speaking, it looks like a blandly touching movie about a lonely old man who befriends a scrappy kid and learns about the magic of storytelling. The Holmes he creates is brusquely direct, but not the icy logical thinker we’ve met often before. The case involves Thomas Kelmot (Patrick Kennedy), a man who is suspicious of his wife Ann (Hattie Morahan) who appears to have a secret life and evil plans in store for her husband.
