Mr. Holmes

by Mitch Cullin, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jeffrey Hatcher

It’s 1947, and Sherlock Holmes is a 93 year old and retired in Sussex. He lives near the sea, he’s got his bees, and he’s not as sharp as he used to be. He’s got a housekeeper, Mrs. Munro (Laura Linney) and her young son Roger (Milo Parker) and the incomplete memory of the case that drove him into retirement.

This is a gorgeously shot, well-costumed, meticulously acted character study of a man in his declining years, and an exploration of the importance of allowing logical intelligence to be tempered with emotional intelligence. Ian McKellen schools everyone in how it’s done.

RHG: One of the tricks with Sherlock is that you need to understand that he’s not an asshole. He likes people. He wants to help people. He just doesn’t get people on an emotional level, and your adaptation will live or die on whether you get that. One of the great weaknesses of BBC’s Sherlock is that the show thinks that all Sherlock cares about is being right and also about Watson to a lesser degree. This movie totally gets it, and so does Ian. He knows when he’s fucked up, but doesn’t get why, and it bothers him so much.

CarrieS : Holmes is challenging because he has to have at least some understanding of the fact that people behave illogically. He has to be able to understand that a person might shoot another person out of rage, even when they are bound to be caught, which works against their self-interest.

Temple Grandin has said that people with autism have to learn certain social behaviors from a script, like in a play, where other people grasp them intuitively. This version of Sherlock had some of that – he’s familiar with things like lust and loneliness and fear and love, but he can’t wing it very well. He can insert them into a script but not improvise in moments of stress.

Some reviewers disliked the film because the cases in the film aren’t very compelling, to which I say, “That’s because the cases aren’t the point of the film, dumbass.”

RHG: And one of the themes of the movie was the contrast between fiction and reality. Watson took the case that Sherlock solved and yet failed and turned it to something that Sherlock solved and won. The reality is that most real-life mysteries aren’t really compelling stories.

Plus, as you say, the point of the movie was a character study of how Sherlock Holmes declines. It’s sad. It’s still a life well lived.

God, Ian McKellen is amazing.

CarrieS: Yeah, I think it’s well worth noting that we both took a while to assemble a reviewer thought beyond, “So, how ‘bout that Ian McKellen?”

RHG: We have seen our first definite Oscar nominee fo 2015. Sorry Leo, I know you’re making a play with The Revenant, but Ian McKellen schooled you by playing a 93 year old man.

CarrieS: The kid was a hell-brat, but he was an understandable brat. It was easy to see why he was so frustrated and why he would take it out on his mom, and the fact that he could be terrible elevated his character from “cute kid who melts heart of curmudgeon.”

RHG: Yeah, the kid was in danger of being purely a plot moppet, but Milo played him with a lot of charm and depth, so good job, kid! And he was given enough to work with that the story of a kid who’s just lived through a war, and who doesn’t actively remember his father, and doesn’t have a lot of planned diversion in his life and how he started the process of growing up is engaging enough. He wasn’t cutesy, and he wasn’t precocious- he was just a smart kid sorting through his life.

CarrieS:  The kid worked beyond cutesy because not only did he not play “cute”, but he tied thematically into the idea that intelligence has to include opportunity (the kid is smart enough to see that he lacks opportunity, which makes him angry) and emotional intelligence (the kid is not sufficiently emotionally mature to see that his mom has her own admirable qualities and is not to blame for his situation).

This was also a movie that was both frustrating and exciting in terms of making it about more than white men. The women were entirely reactive, and that was frustrating, but the actresses gave the parts depth that I don’t think was in the script itself – Laura Linney’s hands were a whole character in and of themselves.

Also, in a movie about war, it took us beyond England and showed how the war affected the Japanese. A lot of the story is about consequences, both intended and unintended (e.g. the various outcomes of offering and refusing the glass harmonica, Hiroshima, pouring water on a wasp nest, interesting a kid in bees and telling him he’s clever) which all plays into Holmes having to accept the consequences of his own actions. Although the women and the Japanese characters were reacting, I never felt like they were completely without agency and they certainly had personality.

I’d give a lot for a sitcom about Holmes and Adler in a retirement home, though. Just Saying.

RHG: I did note that Irene was not listed in Holmes’ litany of the dearly departed, so clearly she’s still kicking it somewhere.

I really liked the storytelling structure- three interwoven stories, each exploring different times and making it clear how much the world changed in Holmes’ life – from solving mysteries in the late-victorian era, to Watson moving out after WWI, to his final years after WWII. The man saw the world go from the horse-drawn carriage to the nuclear bomb and that just blew my mind a little.

CarrieS: Yes to both – loved the side-eye, loved the passage of time and the structure. A lot of it was pretty anticlimactic. I kept thinking there was more to the wasp story than there was. But as we’ve discussed, that was part of the point. In the case of Mrs. Kantor, the stakes regarding the case weren’t high because it had all already happened and been solved – it was about resolving a case, not solving a case. Same with Mr. U.

And in the case of the wasp, who gives a shit whether it was wasps or bees (I mean, obs you want to get rid of the wasp nest, but it wasn’t, like, planted there as part of a murder plot or anything). That was about accepting consequences and making emotional connections – and valuing logic in the process, because the logic both caused the problem and helped resolve it.

RHG: It was a perfect example of kid-logic. “This should take care of it, because it makes sense based on the information I have right now” and not quite having developed enough to be able to know that you should maybe hit the books before trying to kill wasps. How many of us tried something that seemed destined to work perfectly, and it failed in ways we did not expect? All of us. It’s part of growing up and being human. And Roger isn’t the only one who made assumptions- everyone did and it made life more messy as a result. But that’s life.

Ian was on Fresh Air this week talking about his process for embodying a man 20 years older than he is, and he’s as charming as you expect.

CarrieS: That interview is my everything.

This movie will not interest everyone.  As my husband might say, “It needs more explosions.” It’s slow paced, it’s quiet, and it’s also not a romance. But I adored it – it gave me so much to think about regarding the value of emotional intelligence and logical intelligence and the importance of balancing them, and the way we can’t always know how our actions will affect others, even if we have both kinds of intelligence. I’d give it an A-.  you?

RHG: Yeah, an A- is about right.  It’s a leisurely movie, but everyone is WORKING and thinking so much.

CarrieS: Also a must see for people specifically interested in the art and craft of acting. Mrs. Hudson giving side eye might have been written, might have been improvised, might have been requested by director, but whatever, it made a wordless part have personality and opinion and highlighted the idea that women are living lives of endurance that men are incapable or unwilling to understand. Am going with the minus only because I think there might have been some things that didn’t make sense.

RHG: I did have questions about eating plants that grew in Hiroshima less than 2 years after bombing, and Uze may not have had the money or travel clearance to leave Japan, so… I don’t know. Seeing a Japanese woman asking about Holmes’ deerstalker though was kinda adorable.

Mr. Holmes is in theatres now and you can find tickets (US) at Fandango and Moviefone.