Mr Holmes

It's been a bit of a year, and I'm hopelessly behind in posting my notes for the films we have screened.

Way back at the end of January we showed Mr Holmes: Ian McKellen as an ageing Sherlock Holmes. While I enjoyed both the film and his performance, the whole entity did not work for me. I've read too many of Conan Doyle's stories to accept the basic set up of the film. and the long shadow of the BBC's brilliant Sherlock looms large over any attempt to make any film about Sherlock Holmes.

Here are my notes:

Mr Holmes

UK 2015                      103 minutes

Director:                      Bill Condon

Starring:                        Ian McKellen, Laura Linney, Milo Parker, Hiroyuki Sanada and Hattie Morahan

Awards and Nominations

• Five nominations for Ian McKellen  as Best Actor
• A further four nominations

“Like its eponymous hero, the film drifts in and out of focus as it sifts through its deck of memories, a touch broad here, a little undercooked there, sometimes satirical, more often whimsical. Yet Jeffrey Hatcher’s script neatly ties together the interplay between myth and memory – both unreliable and malleable – while McKellen nurtures his character’s changing nature with affection and grace.”

Mark Kermode

After retiring to the South Downs and taking up bee-keeping an elderly Sherlock Holmes (Ian McKellen) is looked after by his housekeeper Mrs Holmes (Laura Linney) and her young son.  As his health declines and he begins to lose his memory he reviews the two cases that made him retire from his role as a consulting detective.

Despite a long, award-winning career on the national stage that began in 1965 Ian McKellen’s screen rolls were for a long time limited to TV and/or specific British films like Richard III (1995), a screen adaptation of the acclaimed National Theatre production that moved the action of the play to a fascist 1930s. It was not until he secured an Oscar nomination for best actor for his portrayal of James Whale in in Gods and Monsters (1998), Bill Condon’s breakthrough film as director, that his international film career began.  Since then his roles as an Oscar nominated Gandalf in Peter Jackson’s two Tolkien trilogies and Magneto in the ongoing X-Men series have meant that he currently stands at 14 in the top 20 of the highest grossing actors in the USA (based on the box office takings of the films in which he has starred) and well ahead of long-established stars such as Robert de Niro and Matt Damon.

Bill Condon started his film career as a scriptwriter for independent films before becoming a director. His screenplay for Gods and Monsters won him an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay and he subsequently wrote the Oscar nominated screenplay for Chicago (2002) His subsequent films as director have included Kinsey (2004) and the musical Dreamgirls (2006), for which he also wrote the screenplay, as well The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Parts 1 and 2, the final films of the lucrative vampire franchise. He is currently working on a film version of Beauty and the Beast, a film version of the Disney stage musical starring Emma Watson and Dan Stevens - with Ian McKellen as Cogsworth (a character who has been transformed into a pendulum clock).

Here's the trailer: