A film debuts in American theaters this week called Mr. Holmes, based on the novel A Slight Trick of the Mind by Mitch Cullin. Two things here:
1. Ian McKellen plays Holmes, late in life after he has retired to the North of England to tend to his bees. In the novel, Holmes is in his early nineties and his memory has begun to fade. The deductive powers are still in place, but without the capacity to hold on to previous deductions and string them along to conclusions, the result is a new figuration of Holmes as a man constantly trying to recall something that is just outside his grasp and facing his vulnerability in a way that was never explored in the original stories. In telling the story of a visit to Japan, and a flashback to one of Holmes' final cases involving the mystery of a glass armonica (an instrument said to be able to summon the spirits of the dead), the novel is deeply moving, and ends with a human pain so personal that I was staggered for days after finishing it. I'm interested to see what the film does with it.
2. The film is directed by Bill Condon, who has had a weird, but sneaky awesome career. He traffics in crispness, in clearly defined color palettes, and (with the exception of the time he spent on the Twilight movies--of which he directed the quirkiest Breaking Dawn 1 & 2) he has excelled at depicting characters on the brink. Gods and Monsters, Chicago, and Kinsey all deal, to one degree or another with characters in extremis. He has also directed McKellen before, getting one of the actor's finest performances as James Whale. It'll be interesting to see how this new performance measures up.
If you get a chance this weekend, this is the kind of film that *should* be worth leaving the house for!
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