Mr. Holmes (2015)

July 25, 2015 5:08 PM

An aged, retired Sherlock Holmes looks back on his life, and grapples with an unsolved case involving a beautiful woman.
posted by metaquarry (10 comments total)

I've seen this twice now - it's been showing in Memphis on just one screen, and selling out pretty much every show. I thought it was lovely, and it's so much less bleak than the book.
posted by tomboko at 9:30 PM on July 25, 2015

McKellen + Holmes is almost TOO exciting a combination. As in, I'm really really worried it'll disappoint me somehow. (Or I was, until I saw that one of this post's tags is "bees" for some reason)
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 3:57 AM on July 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

You want bleak?
posted by whuppy at 7:56 AM on July 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

The bees are very important, yes. :)

I liked the film a great deal, although confess to being moderately exasperated by the de-bleaking of Cullin's novel (which I've taught a couple of times in my Sherlock Holmes course). Mr. Holmes is also depoliticized, as the novel deals much more aggressively with the post-atomic bomb context, and so they lose the riposte to the WWII-era Rathbone/Bruce propaganda films. That being said, the pseudo-Rathbone film-within-a-film gets at least some of the point across.

Without going into spoilerific detail, one way of thinking about all three plots is that they subvert different canonical case forms: the woman in distress; the top-secret government case; the mysterious/dangerous animal.
posted by thomas j wise at 10:47 AM on July 26, 2015 [4 favorites]

I saw this yesterday and enjoyed it. The portrayal of Holmes as a fundamentally lonely man rang true, as did his ambivalence about Holmes-as-written-by-Watson. Milo Parker did very well playing opposite Ian McKellen.

The resolution of the plot involving Umezaki-san seemed a little too pat, however; I'll be interested to compare the film with the book once it surfaces to the top of my TBR pile.
posted by metaquarry at 7:44 PM on July 26, 2015

I was expecting an icing of melancholy, but ended up with a layer cake of sadness. And this adaptation is less bleak than the original?
posted by ocherdraco at 8:12 PM on July 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

(Which is not to say I didn't enjoy it; quite the opposite.)
posted by ocherdraco at 8:13 PM on July 29, 2015

And this adaptation is less bleak than the original?

Let's just say that in the novel, a key event near the end does not have the same outcome as in the film.
posted by thomas j wise at 3:55 AM on July 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

That last comment has convinced me not to read the book.

I loved the movie, which rang really truthy to me because of my personal circumstances. However, it's definitely in the tradition of the British award-bait movie and meets all the expected beats. The ending suggested by the comment wouldn't really meet the criteria so I'm not surprised they went with the lighter ending.

Milo Parker did a great job. He also reminded me a lot of another child actor, maybe Thomas Brodie-Sangster? And it's hard to beat McKellen in fine form.

I hadn't thought of the three classical case forms but my husband and I were dissecting the film and examining how aspects of the three storylines fit together the whole way home.
posted by immlass at 9:06 PM on August 10, 2015

I saw this last night and was so charmed by it. I can't wait to revisit it in a few months. So enchanting, and so beautiful to look it. Just a lovely experience.
posted by the webmistress at 8:18 AM on December 17, 2015