It's not perfect, but that doesn't stop me from adoring it completely. I fear of late that Ian McKellen is going to go down in history as having made his greatest achievements as a genre actor. And while there's certainly nothing wrong with him adding his special brand of gravitas to Peter Jackson's Middle Earth-set epics as the wizard Gandalf, or to the X-MEN films as the team's primary nemesis and eventual comrade Magneto, I'd hate to think that entire generations of film fans will never get to see him perform in a Shakespeare play or an adaptation of a Dickens novel.
Hell, I'd be happy if people got a look at some of the earlier works with filmmakers McKellen has been working with a great deal lately. For example, you should seek out APT PUPIL, his early work with X-MEN director Bryan Singer. Better still, watch or re-watch GODS AND MONSTERS, in which he plays FRANKENSTEIN/BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN director James Whale (coincidentally, both films came out in 1998). McKellen's director on the latter was Bill Condon, who just happens to helm his latest film, MR. HOLMES, in which the esteemed actor plays Sherlock Holmes, a retired detective who is tired of the celebrity that has fallen upon him thanks to fictionalized accounts of his crime-solving exploits.
I love the premise: this is a world in which Sherlock Holmes was not the creation of Arthur Conan Doyle—he isn't a creation at all. All of the accounts of Holmes' were, in fact, written by his partner Dr. Watson, who may have embellished things a bit (Holmes never wore a deerstalker hat or smoked a pipe; he preferred cigars). When we meet him in this story, it's 1947, Holmes has retired, Watson is dead, and the detective is about to take up permanent residence at his secluded seaside farmhouse, where his only company is his housekeeper Mrs. Munro (Laura Linney) and her young son, Roger (Milo Parker). We soon find out that the real reason he's has left the investigation practice is that he is slowly becoming "senile" and is losing his memory more and more with each passing day.
Just before he came to the country house, he took a trip to Japan to seek out a rare root (that has become rarer still since World War II) that is said to help improve the memory, and he is aided in his search by a fan of the Sherlock Holmes books, Mr. Umezaki (Hiroyuki Sanada), who has ulterior motives for wanting to meet the detective. Holmes is plagued by memory loss, especially regarding a specific case—his last case 30 years earlier, which he knows he never solved, and today he can't now remember the specifics of the case or why it baffled him. It was one that Watson never wrote about, and now Holmes would like to be the one to tell his final adventure as truthfully as possible. By committing pen to paper, he's hoping the memories will come back, which they do but quite sporadically, much to his frustration.
Based on the Mitch Cullin novel "A Slight Trick of the Mind" and adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher, MR. HOLMES is a mostly contemplative affair. No one's life is being threatened by a master criminal, either in the present or in the case Holmes is attempting to recall (which is not to say that the planning of a killing isn't happening), but the sense of urgency to solve it is wracking the sleuth's brain for obvious reasons. His trusted ally in memory recall and overall relaxation becomes young Roger, who seems to have a keen mind for problem solving and an even greater interest in Holmes' hobby as a bee keeper.
So really what we have in MR. HOLMES is two films, and to a degree they are both mysterious of different sorts. One is about solving or stopping a crime; the other is about piecing together why this unsolved mystery haunts Holmes to such a degree. He's afraid his dulled recall may have led to someone's harm. The case being written about concerns a man (Patrick Kennedy) who asks Holmes to follow his wife (Hattie Morahan), whom he's afraid is being brainwashed by a music teacher, perhaps for financial gain. When you watch that version of Holmes, you immediately see the wonderfully subtle variations McKellen is using in his portrayal. The detective is confident, charming, dare I say suave? The farm house version is unsure, scared, a man barely holding on in so many ways. It's a fascinating performance and easily one of the best I've seen from McKellen since GODS AND MONSTERS.
Condon has made films about other real people before, with films like KINSEY and THE FIFTH ESTATE (he also did DREAMGIRLS, a veiled account of the Motown experience, and we'll just put his two-part TWILIGHT: BREAKING DAWN epic off to the side for now), so it's fun to see him make a movie that gives a fictional character the emotional touchstones of an actual person. McKellen fills in the flourishes and finds ways to take our hearts in his grip that I was not expecting. The most interesting aspect of MR. HOLMES is how the two stories complement each other; each is made more compelling by the other, and Condon is quite certain of that.
There's a strange crisis thrown in at the tail end that feels like clumsy manipulation. And while the film doesn't need it to achieve greatness, its inclusion doesn't tank it either. It just keeps it from being perfect, and a movie doesn't have to be perfect to still be wonderful. But almost more than anything, I'm excited that younger audiences get a chance to get a look a old-school McKellen doing some of his best work, with hopefully more to come (I'm especially excited about his pairing with Anthony Hopkins in a new adaptation of THE DRESSER for BBC/Starz for director Richard Eyre). Hopefully the renewed hipness of Sherlock Holmes will get people curious about these "real" later years.
