Mr Holmes

When talk­ing about Lit­tle White Lies mag­a­zine, we’re often ques­tioned about our exot­ic, three-tier scor­ing sys­tem. It’s a gauge of feel­ings before, dur­ing and after the expe­ri­ence of watch­ing a movie. Sim­ple. But actu­al­ly, there’s an inter­play between these scores, and antic­i­pa­tion can often have a direct impact on enjoy­ment, and enjoy­ment can have an effect on the view in ret­ro­spect. In the case of Bill Condon’s Mr Holmes, I’m ashamed to say that my antic­i­pa­tion of the film was not high at all.

Recent screen and TV incar­na­tions of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s cal­abash pipe-suck­ing mas­ter detec­tive have either been irri­tat­ing­ly wacky (TV’s Sher­lock), or revi­sion­ist in the worst pos­si­ble way (Guy Ritchie’s grat­ing CG spec­tac­u­lars). And plus, fes­ti­val buzz from when the film pre­miered at the 2015 Berlin Film Fes­ti­val, gleaned via the Twit­ter scrolls of a hand-picked coterie of sharp crit­ics, was not over­whelm­ing­ly positive.

It’s hard to know whether it was this very spe­cial set of cir­cum­stances are what set off the mas­sive upswing in my enjoy­ment and antic­i­pa­tion scores for this very good film. Lov­ing a movie which fate (and Twit­ter) con­spired to advise you was real­ly not good enhances mat­ters immea­sur­ably, as well as evok­ing a mild sense of self-loathing that you’d per­haps denied your­self plea­sure for entire­ly irra­tional reasons.

The great­est strength of Mr Holmes is that is not actu­al­ly about Sher­lock Holmes. Yes, Holmes is in the film, played with expect­ed ten­der­ness, acu­ity and wit by Sir Ian McK­ellen, now as an age­ing ex-sleuth who has ensconced him­self in a Dorset farm­house to rake over the glow­ing embers of his for­ma­tive career as well set­ting the record straight as to his vaunt­ed pub­lic per­sona. Among oth­er such tit­bits, we dis­cov­er that he nev­er wore a Deer­stalk­er, a detail invent­ed by his poet­i­cal­ly-inclined part­ner, Doc­tor Watson.

The film draws from the 2005 nov­el A Slight Trick of the Mind, writ­ten by Mitch Cullin, and what it achieves is some­thing clos­er to the deep psy­cho­log­i­cal prob­ing afford­ed by lengthy prose, and it’s near­ly always at the expense of the sort of daffy, over­wrought prob­lem-solv­ing which made our hero look inhu­man­ly bril­liant. The film dis­man­tles the Holmes leg­end, but not in a man­ner which is pure­ly at the ser­vice of revers­ing the clas­sic iconography.

No, it says, here is a fic­tion­al cre­ation who main­tains a tight men­tal grasp on every­thing and every­one. He can read peo­ple. He has cul­ti­vat­ed a vast store of sci­en­tif­ic and philo­soph­i­cal knowl­edge. But actu­al­ly, the idea that a per­son could every tru­ly know and under­stand anoth­er is a false­hood invent­ed for sto­ry­telling. It places the man who knows every­thing on the ledge of the void of incom­pre­hen­si­bil­i­ty and dares him to jump.

Mr Holmes is about depres­sion. What hap­pens after a strange case has been solved? Do those involved sim­ply revert back to nor­mal­cy? Does the motive of a crime ever real­ly take con­sid­er­a­tion of poten­tial­ly long-ges­tat­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal fac­tors? In his advanced years, with his mem­o­ry on the wane, Holmes has now tasked him­self with try­ing to com­pre­hend the fragili­ty of the human body and mind. His own schol­ar­ly works on the mind expand­ing prop­er­ties of Roy­al Jel­ly and Prick­ly Ash are proved to be quack-work as he begins to under­stand the impos­si­bil­i­ty of amply index­ing human behaviour.

There’s also a touch­ing sub-plot involv­ing his rela­tion­ship with a young, father­less boy Roger, who is being brought up by Lau­ra Linney’s also depressed house­keep­er, Mrs Munro. Holmes tends to he bees and tries to impart his skills to the wide-eyed upstart, even­tu­al­ly real­is­ing that even the most banal of dai­ly actions can be ascribed to the cold­ly metic­u­lous method­ol­o­gy of crime solving.

The film itself is very laid-back and decep­tive­ly slight. There are par­al­lel flash­back nar­ra­tives which, grat­i­fy­ing­ly, only bisect via theme. The fact that the film is con­cerned with the pains of becom­ing scat­ter-brained val­i­dates this more freeform, char­ac­ter-dri­ven sto­ry­telling approach. Makes for a love­ly dou­ble-bill with pre­vi­ous Condon/​McKellen col­lab­o­ra­tion, Gods & Monsters.