Movie review: Mr. Holmes deduces Sherlock as an old man

By Jay Stone

I once got a birthday card that shows a guy looking into a refrigerator stuffed from top to bottom with butter. “Honey,” he’s saying. “Do we have any butter?”

That’s men for you (and I thought it was just me.) Not Sherlock Holmes though. He notices everything, and it’s part of our endless fascination with the character: he’s the smartest man in the room not just because he knows so much, but also because he’s the most awake. We love to watch him do what someone in the drama Mr. Holmes calls his “thing.”

“You know,” he continues. “’The cane shows the marks of a dog’s teeth’ . . . that thing.”

Mr. Holmes is a sentimental reinvention of the legend — Holmes has been reinvented more times than Cher — that finds him at 93 years of age, retired and living in the countryside of England, where he raises bees. He is looking back at his own life, but it is not easy because he is showing the first signs of what used to be called senility.

Before he goes, he needs to solve one final case: he must remember what it must it was about his final mystery that led him to retire. Did he fail at something? He has only the vaguest recollection, and he must gather his wits during his few lucid hours to write down the truth of what happened.

It’s an ingenious conceit (based on the novel A Slight Trick of the Mind by Mitch Cullin) that becomes a showcase for a touching performance by Ian McKellen. Holmes has appeared in many guises — from Basil Rathbone’s imperious problem-solver to Robert Downey Jr.’s ironic ass-kicker — but McKellen has created something new, a Holmes whose sharp edges are softening into a late-life understanding of the limits of logic and the worth of feeling.

It is 1947, and Holmes lives with his housekeeper, the widowed Mrs. Munro (Laura Linney, in a come-and-go British accent) and her son Roger (the remarkable Milo Parker: the English churn out worthy child actors the way that the French manufacture bee-stung ingénues.) Mrs. Munro, a sort of Mrs. Hudson without the patience, looks at her aging employer as a burden, but Roger worships him and seeks to follow his path into both beekeeping and mystery-solving.

Director Bill Condon (who worked with McKellen on Gods and Monsters and with Linney on Kinsey) creates a gauzy post-war England in which his characters are allowed to move slowly through an unfolding mystery. It jumps back and forth in time and space, from 1947 to some 30 years earlier, when Holmes was still a working detective, and also to Japan, where Holmes has gone to find a plant called the prickly ash that reportedly helps memory function.

The central puzzle is, unfortunately, hardly worthy of Holmes — a man has come to the great detective because his unhappy wife is taking illicit music lessons — but the deconstruction of the Holmes story is a fascinating conundrum on its own. The Holmes of Mr. Holmes is a real person whose stories have been told by his assistant, John Watson (using the titles employed by Arthur Conan Doyle.) They have been slightly embellished so that, for instance, Holmes doesn’t wear a deerstalker cap or smoke a pipe, and his address on Baker Street has been changed to keep the curious — mostly Americans, Holmes says — at bay.

Within the Masterpiece Theatre setting, there’s a sneaky postmodern ethos at play as well. At one stage, Holmes goes into a movie theatre to watch the film version of Watson’s book of the very mystery Holmes is now trying to reconstruct in his mind. Unfortunately, as so often happens, the movie is no help at all. “I think I was real until John turned me into fiction,” Holmes muses about Watson’s books.

The various pieces of Mr. Holmes don’t mesh as smoothly as one would like, especially given the precise deductions we’ve come to expect from the hero, but there’s a warm humour in McKellen’s performance of the fading genius, and wisdom in his dawning humanity. It’s the mystery of himself, and of what it means to be a person, that he must solve.

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