Creative reimagining of the
canon is an art unto itself.
Such is the case with the
movie, “Mr. Holmes: The Man Beyond the Myth.” Based on the book, “A Slight
Trick of the Mind” by Mitch Cullin (1985), it explores the life of Sherlock
Holmes in retirement as he raises bees in a farm upon the South Downs in Sussex
in the south coast of England.
Arthur Conan Doyle
(1859-1930), creator of the wildly popular detective, wrote fifty-six short
stories and four novels (A Study in
Scarlet, The Sign of the Four, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Valley of Fear) centered on his
super sleuth.
But when Doyle ‘exiled’ Holmes
to his apiary (The Blanched Soldier, The Lion's Mane and His Last Bow),
it only kindled the imagination of writers convinced
that age could not possibly dim this prodigious mind.
The stories in the canon suggest
that Holmes would have been about 50 years old when he retired in late 1903.
The movie opens with Holmes (played by Ian McKellen in an Oscar-worthy performance) pushing 93 in 1947 in post-WWII England. His mind is
as agile as ever but his memory is failing him. That explains his recent visit
to Japan where he went in search of the elusive “prickly ash,” a plant with
alleged ingredients to spruce up the memory, the ginkgo biloba of its time. He
and his Japanese guide (Hiroyuki Sanada, who has a mystery of his own that he
wants Holmes to solve) discover the plant in the bomb-blasted ruins of Hiroshima. Holmes’s physician derisively calls the plant
“Ashly prick” but is unable to convince Holmes of its uselessness.
Mrs. Munro (Laura Linney,
also brilliant) is Holmes’s long-suffering housekeeper, burdened by her gifted
son Roger (Milo Parker, gifted actor indeed!) who helps Holmes with the upkeep
of the bees and shows all the signs of a budding Sherlock Holmes in his own
right. The pair’s verbal back-and-forth can carry the movie for those for whom
a riposte goes farther than an edge-of-the–seat car chase.
Roger and Holmes run circles
around Mrs. Munro with their observations, their air-tight logical inferences. “She
doesn’t even know how to read,” says Roger in an outburst of cruelty that earns
him a rebuke from Holmes. The practical Mrs. Munro wants to move out for the
sake of her son’s future, a possibility that distresses both Holmes and Roger.
“Exceptional children are the product of unremarkable parents,” Holmes arrogantly
tells his housekeeper, indifferent to the cruelty of the remark. But he redeems
himself by also telling Roger that “a good son always does what a mother asks
him to.” Holmes also makes clear his distaste for people who “cloak cowardice
in flags of sacrifice” and who does not wish, particularly at this stage in his
life, to be a “last resort for lunatics out there.”
The story revolves around an
unfinished case that Holmes investigated thirty years ago, of a devoted wife
(Ann Kelmot, played by Hattie Morahan) whose miscarriages left her, and her
husband Thomas Kelmot (Patrick Kennedy), in misery and suspicion. When finally
Holmes takes the mystery to its logical conclusion, it leads not to a sense of
satisfaction but to a despair unknown to the First Detective who commanded mass
adulation in his prime. “Human nature is a mystery,” says a rueful and
chastened Holmes, “that logic alone cannot illuminate.”
What of the man beyond the
myth? Earlier in the movie, Holmes informs an incredulous Roger that Dr.
Watson, his quintessential sidekick (who had “at that time deserted me for a
wife, the only selfish action which I can recall in our association” as Holmes
recalls in The Blanched Soldier), was
not beyond taking poetic license in transcribing his adventures, including associating
the iconic detective with the hat, the pipe and the cigar. He wishes to correct
the embellishments of Watson who “turned me into fiction.” When Holmes
struggles to recall the case of Ann Kelmot, it is Roger who supplies the
crucial link that allows him to reconstruct the tragedy that unfolded so many
years ago. As to why the case haunts him, Holmes tells his young protégé that “one
shouldn’t leave this world without a sense of completion.”
Holmes’s enigmatic brother,
Mycroft Holmes (The Greek Interpreter,
in which Holmes confided to Watson that “If the art of the detective began and
ended in reasoning from an arm-chair, my brother would be the greatest criminal
agent that ever lived”) makes an appearance to help viewers tidy up the case of
Holmes’s Japanese guide. There are also allusions to Jack the Ripper and, of
course, to the fearsome and ferocious Hounds of the Baskervilles.
There is a subtle, and it
turns out, telling difference between the sting of a bee and that of a wasp.
When Holmes comes upon the seemingly lifeless body of Roger on his estate with
angry stings all over his body, his first instinct is to summon an ambulance before
informing the boy’s mother. In anguish, the mother accuses Holmes of exploiting
the boy and not really caring for him. “But I do,” laments Holmes as he breaks
down before the mother in a heart-breaking scene of pain and guilt, remorse and
repentance.
At the confluence of art and
science lies the power of observation. This is what saves a distraught Holmes,
already reeling from an “outbreak of mortality,” as he suddenly realizes what
really happened to Roger now fighting for his life in the hospital.
“What will happen to the
bees when you are gone,” Roger had asked Holmes earlier. That question helps
Holmes figure out the chain of events that ensued when Roger went to check in
on the bees dying mysteriously in their hives.
Curious? Then consider seeing this
poignant, cerebral movie.
