7/29/2015
Review by David Anthony
One of summer’s treats is the vision of septuagenarian Sir Ian McKellen portraying Sherlock Holmes as a nonagenarian. This is the conceit of Bill Condon’s Mr. Holmes. Being 76 and playing 93 seems intriguing. Jeffrey Hatcher’s screenplay adaptation of Mitch Cullin’s novel is on its face a delightful romp into Holmesiana that gradually unfolds into the bittersweet realm of aging alone. It thus operates on multiple levels.
Following the arc of scholarship on Arthur Conan Doyle, Mr. Holmes self-consciously blurs lines separating fact from fiction, adding new levels of complexity to a familiar character literally “loved by millions” for deductive skill and striking idiosyncrasies.
McKellen’s Holmes fights memory lapses, alternately helped and hindered by others’ accounts of prior epic exploits. Once iconic cases are the stuff of history. Or are they?
McKellen is ably assisted by Laura Linney as Sussex housekeeper Mrs. Munro and Milo Parker as her perspicacious son Roger. The lad is young, vibrant and dedicated to detection, indefatigably striving to reinvigorate the potent Holmes of legend, even as the “real” article faces imminent mortality in the gloomy guise of the grim reaper. This complementarity lends the film a certain charm. Together with visually moving flashback sequences, it adds texture to what could have been predictably formulaic.
Supporting performances by Hiroyuki Sanada as Matsuda Umezaki in a harrowing Hiroshima, Hattie Morahan as agonized Ann Kelmot, and cameos by Frances Barber and Frances de la Tour recreating Madame Schirmer and Matinee Madame Shirmer, respectively, take viewers far into the haunting recesses of Holmesian reminiscence.
Mr. Holmes is perhaps especially poignant in conveying the loneliness of the lifelong journey. However full a stage may have been, at some point the protagonist stands solo, with or without soliloquy, confronting the curtain. What matters is all that may have transpired while the grand drape was up. Afterward all that is left are the tales told by those who knew the main character. In Mr. Holmes Ian McKellen effectively captures the essence of the twilight years, and the myriad anxieties they represent.
No matter what we do, they await us, patiently and resolutely. Now it is time to act.
This is David H. Anthony