Four stars. Rated PG, for disturbing images and dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang
Some stage actors spend their
entire careers hoping to play Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Arthur Miller’s Willy
Loman. When it comes to great literary characters, however, the ne plus ultra appears to be Sherlock
Holmes.
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| Sherlock Holmes (Ian McKellen, left) is delighted when his housekeeper's young son, Roger (Milo Parker), expresses interest in the great detective's beloved hives of honeybees. The boy, in turn, senses that sharing this hobby will help his much older friend forget, if only for brief times, the unpleasant frustrations of advancing age. |
How else to explain the scores of
individuals who’ve taken a crack at the world’s most famous consulting
detective? When Guinness World Records
honored Holmes as the most portrayed literary human character in film and TV, three
years ago, he had been depicted 254 times by more than 75 actors.
That list now includes the
venerable Ian McKellen, starring in director Bill Condon’s adaptation of Mitch
Cullin’s 2005 Holmes pastiche, A Slight
Trick of the Mind.
Arthur Conan Doyle purists may be
dismayed by this handling of their beloved detective, for this is not the
hard-charging rationalist depicted with authoritative panache by Basil
Rathbone, Jeremy Brett, Benedict Cumberbatch and many others. McKellen instead
gives us a frail, almost feeble Holmes, long removed from his illustrious
career, vulnerable to the ravages of time, advanced age and self-doubt.
Condon’s film has an atmosphere
of despondent finality about it: a tone similar to that employed by Richard
Lester in 1976’s equally melancholy Robin
and Marian, wherein Sean Connery’s exhausted and aging Robin Hood is poised
at the similar precipice of mortality.
But even if this Holmes is a
shadow of his former vigorous self, McKellen’s twinkling eyes and insightful gaze
(at the detective’s better moments) remind us that the zealous pursuer of clues
may be deeply buried within this dilapidated frame ... but he’s still there.
The time is 1947, and the
93-year-old Holmes is long retired, having moved to a quiet farmland home along
the Sussex coast, in order to tend to his bees (as per Doyle’s projection of
where the detective would wind up, late in life). Meals and other modest needs
are handled by a live-in housekeeper, Mrs. Munro (Laura Linney), and her young
son, Roger (Milo Parker).
Her husband, the boy’s father,
was killed in the war.
Scripter Jeffrey Hatcher retains
the structure of Cullin’s book, which cross-cuts between three narratives. The
first and most extensive, set in the “present” of 1947, finds the increasingly
lonely Holmes bonding with young Roger, who in turn admires the great detective
as a father figure. Roger’s mother, all too aware of Holmes’ age, worries that
this might not be advisable for a boy who already has lost his real father.
For Holmes, the thought of
building a new relationship — given his limited emotional skills — is
frightening. And yet he senses the necessity, because he has outlived the cast
of colorful friends and associates who remained at his side for so many years:
his brother Mycroft, Dr. Watson, Mrs. Hudson and Inspector Lestrade. The notion
that Holmes had no “family” always was nonsense, because Doyle armed him with a
sterling support system.
As the film begins, Holmes has
just returned from a visit to Japan: a trip prompted by correspondence with a
Japanese admirer, Tamiki Umezaki (Hiroyuki Sanada). Long interested in anything
that might increase longevity and forestall dementia, Holmes is encouraged by
Umezaki’s familiarity with the prickly ash bush, a plant of supposed restorative
powers, which is known to grow in Hiroshima.
Details of this visit, and the
search for prickly ash, unfold in brief segments: the second narrative.
At the same time, Holmes has put
pen to paper in order to write a story himself — a task he traditionally left
to Watson — that turns on the particulars of his final case. Holmes knows that
it must have been a “failure,” because its unhappy resolution drove him to what
has become a three-decade retirement. But fading memory has robbed him of
details, and he cannot recall what (apparently) went so drastically wrong.
He therefore hopes that
approaching the case as an author might lift the veil. Roger is all
encouragement, delighted by the prospect of reading yet another Sherlock Holmes
tale. This, then, is the third storyline; the film periodically jumps back to
London in 1919, as Holmes accepts a case brought by Thomas Kelmot (Patrick
Kennedy), a distraught husband who cannot understand why his wife, Ann (Hattie
Morahan), is pulling away from him.
In lesser hands, such
intermingled narratives could be awkward, even confusing. But Condon and
Hatcher have a firm grip on the material, and the mysteries and unanswered
questions in the distinct storylines help shape each other, with each shift of
time and place.
It’s also a clever stylistic
touch, because what could be dubbed “The Adventure of the Despondent Wife”
allows McKellen a chance at a “classic” Holmes performance, quick of step and
nimble of mind. It even feels like a
typical Doyle conundrum, with a seemingly trivial domestic predicament that
conceals darker waters, and unusual supplementary details such as a brassy
music instructor (Frances de la Tour) who gives lessons on a bizarre instrument
known as a glass armonica.
Holmes’ visit to Japan, in turn,
also is somewhat more than it seems. The setting is grim enough, with much of
Hiroshima still little more than blackened ash and the somber remnants of
flattened buildings; even the sky is a foreboding gray. Ironic, then, that such
a scene of nightmare destruction might host a plant with life-affirming
qualities.
The film’s heart, though, rests
with the irresistible, gently blossoming relationship between Holmes and Roger.
McKellen and young Parker are marvelous together; the boy is precocious to a fault
— often correcting his mother’s grammar — but also sensitive to Holmes’
shifting moods. When in doubt, Roger knows, he always can revive his older
companion’s spirits by suggesting another sojourn with his beloved bees.
At the same time, Holmes is reminded
of his own emotional failings, by observing — and correcting — the boy’s often
thoughtless, even (unintentionally) cruel behavior toward his mother. Mrs.
Munro takes such youthful transgressions in stride, but we know they wound her
deeply, the pain etched in Linney’s expressive gaze. Mrs. Munro is otherwise
tart and businesslike, more (we suspect) out of wounded self-defense, than any
actual antipathy toward her employer.
Not wanting their film to drown
beneath a constant barrage of emotional turbulence, Condon and Hatcher also
have a bit of fun with the whole concept of the Holmsian mythos. As always is
the case, this Holmes exists in a world where he’s fully aware of Watson’s
earlier literary accounts, which — in McKellen’s mordantly amused telling —
have built him a reputation far more flamboyant than actual fact. (Never did go
in for deerstalkers or pipes, Holmes insists.)
At one point, Holmes even takes
in a movie loosely drawn from one of his earlier cases, with his big-screen
self portrayed by Nicholas Rowe (a nice inside joke, that, since Rowe, as a
teenager, starred in 1985’s Young
Sherlock Holmes).
Sanada suggests considerable
complexity in his quietly polite role as Umezaki, and Roger Allam is memorable
as Holmes’ solicitous and deeply concerned physician. Morahan is intriguingly
ethereal as Ann Kelmot: somehow not quite of this world, as though she has
removed herself from earthly concerns.
These admirable turns by the
supporting cast notwithstanding, the film belongs to McKellen; we grieve each
time his Holmes begins a thought, discovers he cannot finish it, and then,
anguished, seems to visibly collapse within himself. We’ve been blessed, of
late, with numerous depictions of elderly characters refusing to go gracefully
into that good night; McKellen gives us another superb portrait ... for what
can be worse than a man who, having relied for so long on his powerful mind,
perceives the dimming of that once-incandescent light?
Excellent acting notwithstanding,
this film remains a melancholy affair, and perhaps not a portrait of Sherlock
Holmes that his many fans ever wished to see. It’s an intriguing irony, because
this character portrait is fascinating precisely because it is Holmes; we’re absorbed by the drama
of this great detective’s advanced age and escalating weakness, to a degree
that wouldn’t be true if McKellen were playing anybody else.
But it remains a tough sell, even
if Hatcher’s script pointedly avoids the mean-spirited conclusion Cullin gives
his novel. This film is unlikely to prompt repeat viewing; it’s also an odd
duck for big-screen theatrical release, particularly during a summer season
laden with noisier popcorn flicks with far larger advertising budgets. Mr. Holmes feels like a Masterpiece Theater presentation that
unwisely wandered off our TV screens.
It’s much more likely to find the
right audience, I suspect, during home video afterlife.
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