Condon: Mr. Holmes (2015)

Whether in the form of Guy Ritchie’s cyberpunk palette, Benedict Cumberbatch’s digital consciousness, or the sprawling seasons of Elementary, Sherlock Holmes has been revised in recent years into something of a harbinger of the post-human, a serial self that has placed ever more creative and ingenious burdens of mediation upon Watson as well. In fact, Watson has been so steadily eclipsing his master that it almost feels as if the next logical step would be a film or series that focused exclusively on Watson, or at least made his presence front and centre in a new way. In some ways, Mr. Holmes is that film, but only because it is quite emphatically a vision of Holmes without Watson, focusing on the great detective, played by Ian McKellen, in the last few years of his life, as he revisits and reconsiders one final case. From the very beginning, it’s clear that director Bill Condon is setting out to revise everything we know about Holmes, as we're cast adrift in the middle of the twentieth-century and removed to a farmhouse that feels light years away from Victorian England, where McKellen puts in a performance that’s so dramatically – and confrontingly – geriatric, infirm and senile that it’s hard to believe that what we’re witnessing is the great detective as recounted by Watson. It’s no surprise, then, that we gradually find out that Holmes’ greatest bugbear is how consistently he was misrepresented by Watson, who, in this version, passed away very shortly after the last of his stories were published, leaving Holmes to deal with the legacy he had created for him. And the great mystery of the film is not a new case, nor an unsolved case, but Holmes’ efforts to distinguish himself from Watson’s version of him, as he finds himself increasingly unable to remember why his last case ended up being his last, but also unwilling to consult Watson’s account of it either, let alone the film serials that are also old news by the time he’s reached this late point in his life. In a quite sobering and sombre take on the post-human Holmes, Condon paints a picture of a man whose faculties are rapidly vanishing, but who for that very reason is even more anxious not to let the last story written by Watson turn into the final word on his professional life, searching his memory, study and personal objects for some clue that he can use to deduce his own past and proclivities as coolly and calmly as he used to deduce those of his clients and suspects. Among other things, that means that not much actually happens in the present – Laura Linney is there as his recalcitrant housekeeper, Mrs Munro, but doesn’t really have much to do, while Holmes himself spends most of time working on his beloved beekeeping, with the help of Mrs. Munro’s son, Roger, played by Milo Parker. At the same time, it’s not exactly a film that takes place in flashback either, since Holmes’ mind is so muddled that he’s unable to dwell on the past for any great length of time. Instead, the film occupies a kind of dissociative space in which Holmes is forced to absorb Watson, to become a kind of Watson to his own life, while also trying to elude Watson’s omniscient influence and voice – an impossible task that doesn’t exactly imbue the film with dynamism so much as a pervasive sense of frustrated impotence that turns it into an extraordinarily moving evocation of getting old, not least thanks to McKellen’s incredible, plastic performance. Buried in there somewhere, of course, is a regular Holmes mystery, but it’s as overmediated and overdetermined, in its way, as those helmed by Cumberbatch, although here that tends towards infirmity rather than hyperactivity, a suffocating sense of quiet rather than endless white noise, as Holmes tries to prevent himself splintering into and falling back upon his serial selves before he loses control of his mental faculties forever. The result is a film that is in some ways more pregnant in memory than in experience, but of course that’s the quintessential experience of watching or reading about Holmes for Holmes himself – at least in this version – in what amounts to one of the first versions of Holmes that feels as if it’s actually told from Holmes’ own point of view, even if it took him a lifetime, and this sombre late work, to properly articulate it.