![]() ![]() 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. 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. ![]() ![]() 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. 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. 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). 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. Reuniting McKellen with Gods and Monsters director Bill Condon, this adaptation of Tideland writer Mitch Cullin’s A Slight Trick of the Mindtells another tale of an ageing legend and his troubled protege. 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. 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. 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. 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. Now comes Sir Ian McKellen, playing Holmes as a lonely recluse, slowly succumbing to senility. 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. 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. 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. ![]()
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