Mr. Holmes (Bill Condon, 2015)
Imdb
Date Watched: 05/04/16
Cinema or Home: Home
Reason For Watching: It looked interesting and I've enjoyed some of Condon's other films.
Rewatch: No
An aging Sherlock Holmes battles dementia as he struggles to recall the details of his final case - the one that made him give up detective work and essentially go into hiding.
I really love Bill Condon's
Gods and Monsters and
Kinsey - enough so that I might even forgive him his two
Twilight films. So I've been interested in this film since I first heard about it a few years ago (from honeykid in my top 100 thread).
There are some definite parallels between this film and
Gods and Monsters, which also starred Ian McKellen. Both films center on once famous men - real life director James Whale in
Gods and Monsters and the fictional Sherlock Holmes here - who live alone aside from the company of a housekeeper. Both men reconnect with their pasts through a friendship with a younger person - though to very different conclusions.
McKellen makes a convincing Holmes - both as the 93 year old Sherlock struggling to remember and as the 60 year old in his memories and brings a wit, sophistication, and dignity that is fitting for the character. The other performances were solid if perhaps not really remarkable. The cinematography is beautiful. But where the film struggles is in its pacing. This is definitely not for the attention deficient and some of the content seemed a bit unnecessary (such as his recollections of his time in Japan), though the film does run under two hours.
Still as a meditation on relationships, loneliness, and human emotion, it is a moving film and one that I can recommend and will probably revisit.
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