Mr. Holmes

Mr. Holmes (2015) is set in Sussex in 1947. Sherlock Holmes is ninety three, keeps bees, and is losing his memory. He is trying to recall the last case he took, thirty years earlier; he has read how Watson wrote it up, knows the account is wrong, and cannot reconstruct what actually happened. The idea is the Holmes legend itself. The character lives alongside his own fictional version: people look at him expecting a deerstalker and a pipe, and he says he never used either. He sits in a cinema watching a film made about him. The source is Mitch Cullin's 2005 novel A Slight Trick of the Mind. The character belongs to Arthur Conan Doyle but this story does not. Bill Condon directed. Ian McKellen plays Holmes at ninety three and thirty years earlier, and the difference between the two ages is built through performance alone. Laura Linney plays his housekeeper and Milo Parker her son. There is a third layer: Holmes travels to postwar Japan and walks through the ruins of Hiroshima. That section was shot in Japan. It runs 104 minutes. Good for: late life character studies, Ian McKellen, and quiet drama. Less good for: this is not a detective film; the mystery is solved and the film has almost no interest in it. Moving between three timelines is tiring. The Japanese section never quite connects to the other two.