Mr Holmes

Who better than the legendary Sherlock Holmes to measure out not just the power but the limitations of man’s reason.

      At 93, Ian McKellen’s Holmes is fending off senility. The most brilliant intellect stays mortal. He has exiled himself to the Sussex countryside, stung — or bitten? — by his failure to have saved a woman from suicide. His logic was enough to understand her but his emotional detachment cost her life — and left him burying the incident too deep to remember. Now he’s trying to recover it by writing up his last case more truthfully than Dr Watson did.

The film can be summarized in the two lead faces. McKellen’s is a battleground of deep crevices where memories and emotions have been interred. His nose extends and hooks from a life of probing. The face of brilliant Milo Parker’s young Roger is an intense, unmarked, open flare of feeling. As the boy learns deduction from the old master, Holmes learns emotions and engagement from the lad. The relationship teaches the old man as much as the boy.

In the last shot Holmes plants stones in memory of the departed, then marshals their spirit. The famed epitome of Reason adopts a Japanese ritual and spirituality. The god’s eye view establishes his new arena of awareness. 

Holmes’s conversion to emotion was prompted by young Roger’s almost fatal dedication to Holmes and his bees. His feelings for the boy lead to an understanding of the boy’s lost relationship to his dead pilot father. That prompts Holmes to write his Japanese contact a consoling lie: that Holmes remembers the man’s father, was indeed responsible for his failing to return home, and that he made an exceptional contribution by his service to Britain. 

It also prompts Holmes to give his homemaker, Roger’s mother, the emotional support she needs and to will her and her son his estate. Having failed one woman Holmes will not fail this one. As he recovers the case he had suppressed, he’s freed to connect emotionally to others, both the close and the distant.   

The reason vs emotion split has a parallel in Holmes: the film plays him as a real person often at odds with the fictionalized version created by Watson. Here Holmes is a real man quite at odds with the Holmeses that have proliferated since Watson’s. He’s bemused by he contemporary film version he watches, whose Holmes has an utterly empty, vacuous and unlived-in face, compared to McKellen’s. His Holmes lives at a different address than Watson declared, spurns the deerstalker and finds the pipe now reduced to abhorrent prop. 

Both sets of antitheses define the human condition as in tension between opposing natures, ever in need of balance. Its emblem is the gift crystal that freezes both the productive and social bee and its enemy wasp. 

As modern man epitomizes science and reason, it’s in the charred ruins of Hiroshima that this Holmes finds the prickly ash he hopes will revive his memory better than the royal jelly did. Neither works, because the human condition can not be approached or addressed by reason or science alone. What these human powers fall short of is the spiritual that this Holmes addresses at the end. Perhaps his doctor has his number when he cites his “ashley prick” — not a bad emblem for the initially irritable and lifeless Holmes here, before an emotional attachment saves him.