Mr Holmes ***½ (2015, Ian McKellen, Laura Linney, Milo Parker, Frances de la Tour) – Movie Review

With a bit of Gandalf in there, and looking and sounding remarkably like Sir John Gielgud, Ian McKellen has a lot of fun slicing the ham as an aged, retired Sherlock Holmes. The great detective is now 93 and living with his housekeeper Mrs Munro (Laura Linney) and her little boy Roger (Milo Parker) in a Sussex village in 1947.

Mr Holmes is keeping bees, and spends time bonding with the clever, awe-struck kid, who is a budding detective. But mum is unimpressed, and wants to move on and take a job with her sister in Somerset.

Old men reminisce, and Holmes is troubled and haunted by looking back on his life. He starts to grapple with an unsolved 50-year old case involving a beautiful woman, Ann Kelmot (Hattie Morahan), whose husband Thomas (Patrick Kennedy) came to him for help years ago. It was his last case, prompting him to retire.

But Holmes is battling memory loss, all he recalls so far is a confrontation with the angry husband and a secret bond with his beautiful but unstable wife.

It’s a prodigal film. Philip Davis (as Inspector Gilbert), John Sessions (Mycroft Holmes), Sarah Crowden (Mrs Hudson), Frances Barber and Nicholas Rowe (the one-time Young Sherlock) have disappointingly very little to do. However, in the case of Frances de la Tour that’s a good thing, because she’s very slack, camping it up shamelessly as German music teacher Madame Schirmer.

Linney, on the other hand, is good in a surprisingly unsympathetic role, disguising her natural charm, and Parker is a scene-stealer, forming a solid bond with McKellen.

It’s all a bit gentle for the cinema in this day and age. Fans of the Guy Ritchie Holmes films would hardly take to it, with its lack of action, strong mystery plot, or even tense or eerie atmosphere. But it has a warm and lazy summer-day charm about it, and also, by contrast, a winter chill feel over it as a meditation on ageing and death.

The characters are of course Arthur Conan Doyle’s but the story and the Holmes spin is very much the work of Mitch Cullin, with Jeffrey Hatcher’s screenplay based on his novel A Slight Trick of the Mind. Now you’d see why they’d need to change that to the more saleable Mr Holmes.

The production values are of a good TV episode, solid but unremarkable. The same is true of Bill Condon‘s direction, conscientious but hardly inspired. It’s up to McKellen and the kid to make it a hit show, and they pretty much do.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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