Bill Condon  (2015)

In 1998 Bill Condon and Ian McKellen collaborated on Gods and Monsters.  Condon’s screenplay won an Oscar.  There are those who think McKellen, nominated as Best Actor, should have won too.  Gods and Monsters offered a partly fictionalised account of the last years of the film director James Whale, after his movie-making career was over.  Mr Holmes, adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher from Mitch Cullin’s 2005 novel A Slight Trick of the Mind, concerns the afterlife – that is, the reclusive, post-celebrity life – of a fictional creation, Sherlock Holmes.  Bill Condon’s aim is evidently twofold:  to explore Holmes’s self-reproachful regrets, revealing a vulnerability rarely prominent in the protagonist of the Conan Doyle stories; and to showcase Ian McKellen’s acting talents.  Condon achieves what he means to achieve but the effect of doing so, as far as emotional engagement of the viewer is concerned, is counterproductive.  You’re always aware of how accomplished McKellen is; you feel little more than that awareness.  Carter Burwell’s score keeps prodding you to be moved by Holmes but the music is counterproductive too:  you resist its pressure.  (It’s possible that Condon’s approach won’t be counterproductive in terms of honours for McKellen’s performance although the film seems too flimsy and poky to be an awards contender.)

In 1947, Sherlock Holmes, aged ninety-three, is holed up in rural Sussex.  He keeps bees and lives in a farmhouse, with his housekeeper, Mrs Munro (Laura Linney), a World War II widow, and her young son Roger (Milo Parker).  Holmes’s mental powers are in decline:  royal jelly from his hives doesn’t help so he has recently travelled to Japan – Hiroshima (!) – to obtain another possible cure in the form of ‘prickly ash’.  Although Holmes’s memory is failing, it’s still functioning well enough to give him a persistent guilty conscience about the consequences of his past actions, experienced in a series of flashbacks.  The film’s climax sees him on the verge of causing even more grief, when Roger, who’d do anything for the old gentleman, is stung by a pail of wasps and hovers between life and death.  Waiting in the hospital for news, Holmes tells Mrs Munro that he’s changing his will to leave the farmhouse and its land to her and Roger.  This seems a crude bid to  discourage Mrs Munro from moving to another job in Portsmouth but it succeeds and Roger recovers.  In the final scene, Holmes makes peace with his past and the important people in it. He plants a series of stones to commemorate each one of them, and, kneeling on the ground, offers up an elegantly theatrical prayer.

Every breath he takes, every move he makes, you’ll be watching Ian McKellen (if you can stay awake, that is:  this really is a pretty dull film).  But his technical skill is too evident and overpowers the small story of Mr Holmes.  Each perfectly achieved gesture, facial expression and line reading seems to be inflated by the performer’s consciousness of his superb technique.  Dave and Lou Elsey’s excellent make-up subtly but strongly differentiates the sixty-going-on-seventy Holmes in the flashbacks from the nonagenarian but McKellen himself doesn’t always make a correspondingly clear distinction.  There are moments when he seems to get around rather too quickly for a geriatric of the 1940s; whether this is actual speed or the impression created by his histrionic energy is hard to say.  A few years ago, McKellen made a guest appearance in an episode of Ricky Gervais’s Extras and lampooned, easily and very funnily, his distinguished actor persona.  Since I’ve never seen him on stage, I’ve never experienced McKellen in the medium in which he’s reputedly at his best.  On screen, though, I’ve never seen him free of the fine-acting self-awareness that he satirised in Extras.   Reviewing the recently-announced Academy Award nominations earlier this year in the New Yorker online, Richard Brody wrote as follows:

‘And then there are British bio-pics – this year’s contenders being The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything. The Academy’s inferiority complex is showing. There needs to be a separate category created – “Best British Bio-Pics and Their Actors” – to help the Academy satisfy its aspirational gentility (interpret that last word any way you’d like). This category would also keep the slate clear for films and performances of vigorous originality.’

This is hard on Eddie Redmayne but watching Ian McKellen as Sherlock Holmes brought Brody’s comments to mind, even though – or perhaps because – Mr Holmes is a faux-biopic.  There’s an unintended convergence here between the conceit of concocting the life of a man who didn’t exist and the artifice of the film’s lead actor.

There are plenty of formulaic moments and a few sloppy ones.  When Holmes, who’s trying to disguise his increasing physical frailty, takes a fall in his bedroom and hurts himself, Roger helps him to conceal from Mrs Munro what’s happened:  this consists of changing Holmes’s bloodied pyjama jacket but not his pyjama trousers, so that he ends up half in red stripes and half in blue stripes.  Perhaps this is meant to illustrate how gaga the great sleuth is getting but I doubt it (especially as Roger, a keen reader of the stories of Holmes’s cases, doesn’t comment).   When Roger is found unconscious with stings all over his face and neck, Holmes and Mrs Munro assume at first that Holmes’s bees have attacked him.  Holmes deduces that the culprits are wasps since bees leave their stingers behind and there’s no sign of these in Roger’s wounds.  Holmes may feel relieved and pleased with himself for this piece of detective work but its apparently reassuring effect on the boy’s mother is baffling:  if her son’s life is in danger, why would she care whether wasps were to blame rather than bees?  Laura Linney’s acting is, as always, conscientious but she radiates intelligence:  you don’t get sufficient sense of the discrepancy there’s obviously meant to be between Mrs Munro’s intellect and her emotional understanding.  Milo Parker, although he holds his arms rather stiffly, has a likeable, clear-eyed cussedness as Roger.  As the unhappy woman at the centre of a long-ago case, for whose suicide Holmes blames himself, Hattie Morahan is gravely magnetic and has an interesting and expressive voice:  she’s much more affecting than McKellen.   Roger Allam provides a nice cameo as the aged Holmes’s doctor (not Watson, who’s played by Colin Starkey in a brief flashback appearance).

23 June 2015