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.
