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Mr Holmes review – the old sleuth on the trail of his younger self

Ian McKellen brings affection and grace to a whimsical portrait of an elderly Sherlock Holmes, struggling with his memory and his myth

Mark Kermode, Observer film critic

Monday 22 June 2015 09.00 BST / http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jun/22/mr-holmes-review-mark-kermode

Is there a version of Sherlock Holmes we haven’t seen? Screen incarnations of Arthur Conan Doyle’s most celebrated character date back to the birth of cinema (the tricksy short Sherlock Holmes Baffled was made at the turn of the century), and Conan Doyle himself praised actor Eille Norwood’s “wonderful impersonation of Holmes” in shorts and features from the early 1920s. John Barrymore, Raymond Massey and Clive Brook all played the detective before The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) established Basil Rathbone as the iconic bearer of the deerstalker and pipe combo. More recently we’ve had Robert Downey Jr as a pugilist detective in Guy Ritchie’s punchy reboots, and Benedict Cumberbatch as a thoroughly modern Sherlock in the hit BBC TV series.

Now comes Sir Ian McKellen, playing Holmes as a lonely recluse, slowly succumbing to senility. The year is 1947, nearly 30 years after the troubling events which ultimately caused Sherlock to retreat to the country, and the care of his beloved bees. Attended by housekeeper Mrs Munro (Laura Linney, of no fixed accent) and her young son Roger (rising star Milo Parker), the rheumy-eyed 93-year-old dithers hither and yon, his step uncertain, his face saggy and liver-spotted. By day, he potters around his apiary, growls at his doctor (McKellen’s range of grunts is as wide as Timothy Spall’s Mr Turner), and supplements his diet with prickly ash, a rare plant gathered in Japan with alleged healing properties. But as he struggles to remember the details of his life, so we spiral back into the past – to the case that proved his undoing, and to the eastern trip from which he brought back more than mere medication.

Reuniting McKellen with Gods and Monsters director Bill Condon, this adaptation of Tideland writer Mitch Cullin’s A Slight Trick of the Mind tells another tale of an ageing legend and his troubled protege. There’s a hint of Gandalf’s melancholic magic in McKellen’s portrayal of a curmudgeon who been there and back again, but it’s in the contrast between the film’s gently juggled time periods that the sparks really fly. Excellent makeup work by Dave and Lou Elsey adds to the illusion that scenes were shot decades apart as Sherlock’s failing memory carries him from Sussex in 1947 to Baker Street in 1919, and his encounter with bereaved Ann Kelmot (Hattie Morahan). Here, his skin is taut, his eyes clear, his senses sharp – although his understanding of emotion remains elementary; faced with the otherworldly tones of a glass harmonica, Holmes reads the clues but hears no music. Only later, when his ruthless logic is lost, does he tune in to something approaching sympathy, and all the ragged ends that come with it.

Nodding toward such revisionist texts as Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) and Nicholas Meyer’s 1974 novel The Seven-Per-cent Solution (filmed in 1976), Mr Holmes unpicks Sherlock’s unravelling state of mind in a manner both investigative and avuncular. From Tobias A Schliessler’s glowing cinematography to Carter Burwell’s reassuring score and Martin Childs’s handsomely detailed production design, there are few sharp edges here. Instead there’s a sense of playfulness as Holmes wrestles with the artifice of his legend: living across the road from 221B and thus evading American tourists, apologising for not brandishing the hat and pipe (an illustrator’s invention), responding reluctantly to Roger’s demands that he theatrically recount his mother’s movements by analysing her hair and clothing. At one point, he even goes to the movies to watch a fictional Sherlock Holmes, and scoffs at the matinee preening of Nicholas Rowe, who (in a further level of metatextuality) once played the lead in Young Sherlock Holmes.

Like its eponymous hero, the film drifts in and out of focus as it sifts through its deck of memories, a touch broad here, a little undercooked there, sometimes satirical, more often whimsical. Yet Jeffrey Hatcher’s script neatly ties together the interplay between myth and memory – both unreliable and malleable – while McKellen nurtures his character’s changing nature with affection and grace.

‘I relate to the way Sherlock talks about death’: Ian McKellen on his new film role

Stage giant relishes the challenge of playing detective in old age

“For Sherlock, in this story, it is quite a race against time. It is not quite like that for me. I don't intend to retire”

Sir Ian McKellen

Vanessa Thorpe

Sunday 8 February 2015 00.06 GMT / http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/feb/08/sherlock-film-mr-holmes-ian-mckellen

There will be no deerstalker. There will be no pipe. In their place will be a straw hat and a walking stick. But with the appetite for Sherlock Holmes growing after the worldwide success of Benedict Cumberbatch’s television portrayal, Sir Ian McKellen is about to give fans of the great sleuth more of what they crave.

The 75-year-old actor’s new film, Mr Holmes, has its world premiere at the Berlin film festival on Sunday and offers a vision of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective living quietly in retirement in Sussex, keeping bees. Directed by Bill Condon, the film is about a crime, but also about age, unreliable memory and the power of the past.

Preparation for the part has allowed the award-winning Shakespearean actor to reflect on his own age. “Mr Holmes really is as much about being old as it is about the crime,” McKellen said this weekend. “I do relate to the ease with which Sherlock talks about death. That ease is something that has come to me and to a lot of my friends. Death is suddenly ever-present, although we all ignore it when we are young.

“For Sherlock, in this story, it is a race against time, and it is not quite like that for me. I don’t intend to retire. I will go on working on and off. I am happily going on with my life.”

McKellen was not daunted by the task of playing the most celebrated literary creation ever to solve a mystery. “Sherlock has already been played by 120 actors and it’s rather the same thing as playing Hamlet. The role doesn’t belong to you and, if you think it does, you have the wrong idea.

“There have been lots of manifestations of Holmes. Possibly the most famous now is Robert Downey Jnr’s, or perhaps Benedict Cumberbatch’s, who is a more traditional Sherlock in many ways.”

Yet it is an earlier incarnation of Holmes that casts the longest shadow for McKellen. “People of my generation tend to look to Jeremy Brett, who played him on television. He did it for such a long time and so astonishingly well. I would not even want to challenge that performance. My little Holmes adventure is nothing like anybody else’s Holmes.”

Burnley-born McKellen was drawn to the screenplay’s treatment of memory. “I have been thinking about my own memory recently because I am thinking about writing a memoir. I have not kept a diary, which would have made it a lot easier. There are plenty of things I have forgotten and it is usually a great pleasure if someone does remind me of a lost memory. But memory works like that. It discards things and keeps others. It has its reasons.”

The film is based on American writer Mitch Cullin’s 2005 book A Slight Trick of the Mind, and has the premise that Holmes is struggling with the early stages of dementia and trying to recall his last case.

“He is happily living as an apiarist, a long way from London and from crime, but he knows his memory is not what it was. In the film you see flashbacks of him solving the crime and he is trying to remember how he did it. He knows he did,” said McKellen. “The film actually starts with scenes in Japan, where Holmes is trying to find a sort of elixir that will help him regain his memories.”

McKellen is busy learning a part, which he will play opposite Sir Anthony Hopkins, for a television film of Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser, and admitted he now finds learning lines a chore. “My own memory has not given me problems yet when it comes to work, although learning lines for an actor is not the way people imagine it. It is not like learning a list; it is about connecting emotions with a story. Some of my friends tell me they will not work in live theatre again because of the difficulty they have with lines.”

For the actor, an unexpected bonus of taking the screen role of Holmes was a close encounter with bees. “One of the great joys for me was going to look at the bees kept on the top of Fortnum & Mason’s store in Piccadilly,” said Mc Kellen. “They make honey for the shop, and mostly feed on the flowers and trees in Buckingham Palace Gardens and the surrounding parks, so it is actually purer than much rural honey, where a lot of insecticide and sprays are used.

“Before we started filming in the country, some hives were planted nearby, so they would have time to adjust. I had to deal with them in the film and I am happy to say there were no accidents. I was fully expecting to be stung. I did have to take my glove off at one point, but bees are not interested in stinging you.”

Conan Doyle aficionados will find nothing to offend them in the new film, McKellen suspects. “Anyone who loves those stories will enjoy it. One of the key ideas is that the Sherlock people know was a bit of a creation of John Watson and not the real man. This Holmes much prefers a cigar to a pipe and has never worn a deerstalker.”

The original Holmes stories are not always as the public imagines, McKellen argues. “They are not all set in London. I recently read The Valley of Fear for Radio 4 and much of that is set in America.”