Mr. Holmes

source: Mr. Holmes

Inasmuch as I contribute to IMDb, it makes sense that I also rely on it. So prior to buying a ticket I checked the IMDb reviews. They were universally positive. They were also astonishingly short-sighted. First, this is not truly a Holmes tale in any sense of the word. I have read all the original stories (back when reading was fashionable) -- some more than once -- and seen almost every screen/TV adaptation to the present. My faves are Basil Rathbone, the Moffatt series (each more an elaborate stage play than a TV show) and the bizarre but hypnotic US re-imagining with Lucy Liu as history's most photogenic Watson. Which if nothing else shows how flexible the Holmes tale is. Or at least was. Here they pushed the Holmes myth further than any writer ever has and in my view, they broke it. This is not Holmes vs. a killer, this is Holmes vs. Old Age. (Arguably the most potent killer of all time, but still not proper fodder for a detective story.) Yes yes, the acting is wonderful (Linney is under-rated, in fact) and the scenery is wonderful .... yada yada yada. All this not only ignores the "false expectations" that are raised in the premise but also overlooks how depressing this is to anyone of advanced years. Which then creates the paradox. Only a moviegoer of advanced years would want to take the time see Ian McKellen in this role -- younger viewers are lining up for Ant-Man and MI -- and yet this target audience is also the most likely to leave the theatre looking for the nearest bridge on which to practice their hi-diving skills. You have been warned.

Perhaps no character has proved more adaptable than the classic Arthur Conan Doyle brainiac atheist Sherlock Holmes. Movies based on the character date back to the 30's, books far longer and there have only been short stretches of time between televisions series. We have had Holmes as young, an effete intellectual, a menacing bruiser, a women and now elderly. Here the great Sir Ian McKellan gets some opportunity to put offer up his variation but only to a limited degree. Largely the movie concerns the ravages of age as an elderly Sherlock watches in the pages of a date-book provided by his doctor his dizzying intellect fade to the point he cannot remember the people around him. While well- acted and beautifully shot, the film lacks a central driving plot to keep things moving. The underlying mystery - whether Holmes can piece together in his ever decaying memory his last case and reason for leaving the profession to take up beekeeping - has no real consequences other than his person satisfaction of having put it together. This lack of narrative drive and an appropriately slow pace given the main character is 93 years old makes for a film that seems to be something like double it's actual running time. It also has more the feel of a "Masterpiece Theater" episode than something that needed a theatrical release. In short, stream it when it hits Netflix.

I had my doubts about MR. HOLMES when I saw that it was based on a book by an American novelist and had a screenplay by an American writer. I've nothing against our American cousins, but when I sat down and watched the movie my worst fears were confirmed: although the film occasionally plays lip service to the works of Conan Doyle, this is utterly unlike any kind of Sherlock Holmes I've seen before. I didn't recognise him. It's like some American literary novelist's idea of what Holmes should be rather than an attempt to connect with the great man himself. And I know for a fact that there are American pastiche authors whose work will be forever ignored by Hollywood who can write much better Holmes than the one depicted here. The film's idea is to posit Holmes as an elderly man in his final years. The slow-moving narrative mixes together three separate story lines, two from his past and one set in the present day. And the problem with this film? It's so slow! Everything is dragged out to the most minute detail and none of it is interesting, at all. Ian McKellen is a good actor - although Bill Condon is a bit lazy, making almost exactly the same kind of film as his GODS AND MONSTERS from a couple of decades ago - but he doesn't play Holmes here, just some kind of wise old man. Each of the stories has flaws and faults. I was primarily interested in seeing Hiroyuki Sanada (one of my favourite actors) in the Japanese storyline, but it's very weak and simplistic and Sanada only shows up in a couple of scenes. The main mystery back story is depressing and unlike any of the cases that the literary Holmes investigated. The present day stuff is better, but the kid is annoyingly wise and chirpy, and Laura Linney's presence is a big distraction given her awful accent, which is all over the place. Overall, MR. HOLMES is a real bore, something that none of the original stories and few of the earlier adaptations were.

MR HOLMES is a clever conceit that unfortunately never goes anywhere. The plot sees an aged Holmes in 1947 living in self-imposed exile in a remote village, with only his widowed housekeeper, her son and his bees for company. Spurred on by a recent visit to Japan (cue the inevitable shots of the devastation in Hiroshima), he tries to recollect and write down his last case - the one which caused him to go into exile - which involved a beautiful woman in the 1920s. The dementia allows the filmmakers to make effective use of flashbacks to tell the story but otherwise it's an over-predictable British period drama: superb actors, excellent production design and beautiful landscapes...but nothing to say. Life in exile is not that interesting - McKellen's brilliant performance aside - and the final case is almost absurdly slight. It all culminates with Holmes, the man of logic, deciding that sometimes fiction is superior to fact; the sad truth is that the popularly- imagined Sherlock, with his pipe and deerstalker and impossibly precise deductions, is rather more interesting than this somewhat dull intellectual chamber piece.

This film is no Sherlock Holmes mystery story. Rather it's a depiction of what Holmes would be like as an old man. A big part of it is Holmes trying to remember and regretting his last case in which he failed to comfort a woman considering suicide. Holmes is also world famous because in this universe, the Holmes stories were written by Watson as accounts of his cases. The film is interesting as a depiction of an old Sherlock Holmes and his problems but can be kind of boring as not much happens throughout the story, the direction is in a slow style, and it drags on for a while. You would like it more if you like deep, emotional dramas rather than exciting adventure movies. The musical score, like the rest of the movie is slow and sentimental. The characters besides Holmes like Mrs. Munro ,Roger, Tamiki Umazaki and Ann Kelmot are pretty well acted, but what I really liked about it were the costumes and production design, which were totally amazing to look at.

I adored this film and I thought that Ian Mckellan displayed his true mastery in the field of acting, he has few peers and none outside of the UK. I was surprised that Laura Linney was chosen for the part of housekeeper but she did the part wonderfully well even if her accent was more west country English than Sussex but she really was plunged in the deep end. This film was beautiful, clever and intelligent but was not the type of film that would appeal to the masses or those who wanted to see 'terminator' battle with 'alien' or the appalling spectacle of Robert Downey Junior as Sherlock Holmes which is by contrast, drivel of the first order. For me, Jeremy Brett was the epitome of Sherlock Holmes but I can think of no other person to play Holmes as an elderly man than Ian McKellan. I lived in Sussex UK in the eighties and am very familiar with that beautiful part of the country, Cuckmere Haven and Hope Gap is the place where Holmes would have ended his days.

What a boring film this is. Don't get me wrong I love Sherlock Holmes films and I watched each and every one of them and all the past and recent adaptations. movies and TV series. But this takes the cake for the most boring and unnecessary film ever. Who wants to watch a 93 year old Holmes who's losing his marbles right before his death ? Nobody. I'd rather watch a Meryl Streep drama film than this. I was three quarters in the film and I thought it would never end or it doesn't really have an ending. 3 stories all mushed up together to produce a single Holmes case. The only interesting thing in the movie was that darn glass harmonica and that was not even part of solving the case. Maybe they threw that in for no reason at all. Couldn't they just tell us that Holmes doesn't recall anything and he just goes home and die, they had to make an entire film out of it ? Jesus Christ right near the ending of the film I thought Holmes would just put on his Gandalf costume and disappear in the horizon. Sherlock Holmes is not Jackie Chan like in the Robert Downey Jr. films but neither would we want to watch him dragging himself and the entire cast into oblivion with the most crappy case ever. I didn't feel the romance, couldn't bring myself into the Holmes era, wasn't at all impressed with the acting, it was just a rather boring film and I wished it was an hour shorter. It was better than the Jackie Chan Holmes Downey Jr. films but not a good one either. All in all, I reckon they should have done a much better job with this if they haven't focused that much on Sherlock losing his memory. Don't pay to see it, download it and watch it during daytime so you want fall asleep before bedtime. I just expected more and the movie didn't deliver. Even the elderly crowd in the theater started yawning after the first half of the movie.

A few scenes into this presentation and I thought I'd wandered into someone's Alzheimer's memory class. Crisp sharp cinematography is in sharp contrast to the muddling inconsequential meanderings that turn out to be the story. If you know the gardens at Hatfield House, the Sussex coast and a little National Trust B&B in Kent you'll play along with that aforementioned memory game happily enough. However, as a 'crime', 'Sherlock Holmes the detective' story it fails miserably. McKellan appears to have used the wonderful Geoffrey Palmer to model his characterisation on - nicely done too but, this is not a film for anyone wanting meat in their sandwiches. Sleep was not far from mind with several occasions of closed eyes, leaning back into the cinema seat, for my liking. I have a perfectly serviceable bed at home. I don't need to pay to doze in public surrounded by nibbling from boredom cinema-goers. Give this a miss.

As a standalone film, one of the great charms of Mr. Holmes is that it can be viewed with equal level of enjoyment by two different types of people: the type who know nothing other than the basics regarding the character of Sherlock Holmes, and equally the people who have seen or read everything about him. It manages to appeal to both camps by being both a revisionist version of his stories, yet still keeping in the same spirit and not denying any of the prior literature. Due to the fact that the film's metronome is a 93-year-old man losing his memory, the pace is unfortunately slow for the first half of the film. Having multiple flashbacks that omit information until necessary keeps the viewer guessing but also at times frustrated. In the meantime, the real entertainer is Sir Ian McKellen, who is not nearly as old as his character is in real life and yet captures the nuances of someone that age to precision, all while forming his own character of the titular Holmes. It's one I hope can make its way into the Oscar conversation yet is so much simpler I won't count on it. The second half of the film picks up in pace as the 3 story lines all begin to start solving themselves, but more importantly Mr. Holmes (I don't think his first name is ever uttered in this movie) starts to realize a moral that he never quite came to terms with in all of his sleuthing regarding the truth and humanity. I've seen a solid handful of the countless Sherlock Holmes incarnations (he is the most commonly portrayed character in cinema) and there is something that becomes almost tragic about each one as you realize he is someone whose intelligence and wit makes him unable to live normally amongst other 'ordinary' people. As some subtext, it is perhaps a nice touch that Mr. McKellen is a proud member of the LGBT community, as there is reason to believe (although rarely outwardly said) that Sherlock Holmes may be gay himself. These are details you don't need to watch the story but can help enhance the nuance. In terms of filmmaking, director Bill Condon and co. don't particularly do anything to motivate the situation other that just let the characters take care of business. Again, this is not a movie notable for having a quick pace, but it is never dull altogether either. The next movie I'll be watching is Gods and Monsters, the previous Condon/McKellen collaboration. As you can see from how much I've written, I'm fond of the movie, enjoyed the numerous elements, and was left with a lot to think about. It's a small scale film and should be viewed as such, but is nonetheless enjoyable and is a nice spin on the iconic character.