Bill Condon’s Mr. Holmes is a perfectly serviceable adaptation of a latter-day Sherlock novel not written by Arthur Conan Doyle, starring a character whose episodic escapades are better suited for television.
It’s a beautifully shot story that remains confined to about three locations. It’s an engaging mystery told through flashbacks that only remains unsolved because we need to wait for its lead to remember what happens next. In other words, Mr. Holmes is the pleasantly self- defeating, forgettable feel-fine movie of the summer.
Ian McKellen plays the legendary sleuth as a retired old man attempting to live out his days in seclusion, tending to his bees in the English countryside. He is joined only by his impatient housekeeper (Laura Linney) and her intrepid, curious son (Milo Parker). He enjoys the solitude, away from the notoriety generated by the “penny dreadfuls” of former colleague Dr. Watson. Holmes sees Watson’s works as vulgar simplifications of the real circumstances surrounding his solved cases and a distortion of his own demeanor, so he sets about writing what he considers the truth of his mysteries. The trouble is that he is plagued by memory loss in his old age, a terrible fate for his famous mind.
McKellen plays triple duty, portraying Holmes in three converging storylines, two told through flashback: his recent trip to Japan, and the story he is attempting to finish writing before it completely escapes him. McKellen does a terrific job putting his stamp on a character that is so firmly embedded in the public’s mind, and the narrative cleverly explains away the cap and pipe as Watson’s embellishments, giving this iteration room to make its own mark. But despite its good intentions and somewhat skillful execution, Mr. Holmes goes nowhere, slowly. At first, the performances and Masterpiece Theatre-esque pacing are charming, yet before long, it becomes clear that there’s really no point to all of this. This is the world’s most famous detective attempting to solve a riddle where the answer is in his own mind, which sounds exciting but in practice is just sitting around and waiting for him to remember it.
It’s perhaps no surprise that the most famous interpretations of Sherlock Holmes as a character have been serialized, whether on television or radio. This is because his adventures are episodic by their very nature. A film works best as a complete artistic statement, while an episode of a TV show comes with the knowledge that there is more to come. Mr. Holmes could have worked as an hour-long television special, but there simply is not enough here to fit a feature film that comes to a definitive end. The storylines, each somewhat interesting on their own, fail to come to any meaningful intersection.
In the end, Mr. Holmes doesn’t have much to go on besides a decent lead and its intentional blend of “Sherlock” and “Downton Abbey.” Moment to moment, you’ll enjoy yourself, yet like Holmes himself, when called upon to remember what made it so important, you won’t be able to recall.
Playing this week
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Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX
244-3213
