Sherlock Holmes on Film – Part 1: Mr. Holmes (2015)

A Victorian in the 21st Century

Sherlock Holmes apparently remains as popular as ever – and not only among the investigators of our detective agency in Kiel. The master detective is currently appearing on cinema screens and television sets more frequently than he has in years. High-budget blockbusters by director Guy Ritchie starring Robert Downey Jr., as well as television series such as Sherlock from the BBC and Elementary from CBS, have generated millions – at the box office, through advertising, and in merchandising. In our new series “Sherlock Holmes on Film”, we will take a closer look at all three adaptations.

 

Holmes is such an iconic figure that one easily loses track of the countless stories written and filmed over the decades in which he appears either as protagonist or supporting character. Depending on the genre, he encounters real historical figures of his time or “colleagues” from Victorian literature. The imagination of authors seems limitless: real criminal cases such as those of Jack the Ripper, as well as scenarios involving characters created by writers like H. G. Wells (The War of the Worlds) or Bram Stoker (Dracula), serve as the backdrop for more or less original tales. Holmes is so closely associated with the Victorian era that it is often overlooked how many of the original Sherlock Holmes stories by his creator Arthur Conan Doyle were written after the end of that period. When Queen Victoria died in 1901, Doyle himself seemed to have grown tired of his hero: eight years earlier, he had already allowed Holmes to die in the short story The Final Problem. Yet the majority of the stories – two of the four novels and three of the five short story collections – were still to come.

Mr. Holmes: A Humorous Deconstruction of Sherlock Clichés

The fact that a significant portion of the fictional detective’s life would have taken place after the Victorian era is also central to the most recent cinematic interpretation. We approach the topic in reverse chronological order: in Mr. Holmes, directed by Bill Condon and based on A Slight Trick of the Mind by Mitch Cullin, Sherlock Holmes is the survivor of a long-vanished epoch. Watson, Mrs. Hudson, his brother Mycroft – all have long since passed away. Holmes himself retired to the countryside more than 30 years earlier and now keeps bees – a motif found in several Holmes pastiches, including those by Henry Fitzgerald Heard.

 

One particularly charming device in the film is its playful handling of the Sherlock Holmes cliché. In Mr. Holmes, Holmes is indeed a famous real person – but the public perception of him stems entirely from the writings of the equally real John Watson, not from Doyle. The deerstalker hat and cape? Holmes claims he never wore them. The pipe? He preferred cigars. Even the address was fictional: Holmes amused himself in London by watching curious onlookers – “American tourists,” as he dryly remarks – gather at 221B Baker Street from the window of his actual apartment across the street. In a delightful scene set in the 1940s, Holmes watches a fictionalised film version of one of his cases in the cinema, featuring a “classic” Holmes complete with deerstalker, cape, and pipe – a wink to the successful film series starring Basil Rathbone, which we will of course also discuss in this series.

Humanising a Superhuman Mind

The framing story of Mr. Holmes takes place in 1947. Holmes thus becomes a witness to the dawn of the atomic age – a theme subtly referenced in several scenes. Frail and plagued by senility, he attempts to reconstruct the events of his final case 35 years earlier, the case that led him to abandon detective work and London life altogether. Yet what makes the film truly original is the absence of what traditionally defines Sherlock Holmes stories: a central criminal mystery. Who is the murderer? What was the motive? These questions are secondary. The greatest detective of all faces one final and deeply personal riddle: Who is Sherlock Holmes when he loses the very faculty that defines him?

 

In a moving reflection, Holmes admits that he has been alone all his life, but that his intellect always compensated for this solitude – and now, in old age, that intellect is slipping away. What happens to a man whose entire identity rests upon razor-sharp reasoning when that very sharpness begins to fade? Holmes becomes vulnerable, plagued by doubt, no longer a calculating machine but a fragile human being. For perhaps the first time, his heart is touched – not least through the inquisitive son of his housekeeper – and this emotional awakening unsettles him profoundly. The mystery of the film is not a crime, but Holmes himself. Audiences have long known him as brilliant yet distant, almost cold – or, as Benedict Cumberbatch memorably phrased it in Sherlock, a “high-functioning sociopath.” Intimacy has rarely played a role in Holmes adaptations. That is precisely what makes Mr. Holmes so refreshing. Ian McKellen, himself an icon accustomed to portraying iconic roles, delivers a superb performance as a stumbling, ageing Holmes haunted by the ghosts of his past. Told across three interwoven timelines, the film adds new and endearing facets to the character.

New Realism, Unexpected Humanity

Is the film worth watching? Viewers expecting action in the style of Guy Ritchie or gripping criminal suspense may be disappointed. However, those open to a quieter, character-driven narrative should not miss Mr. Holmes – especially fans of Sherlock Holmes. Just as the everyday work of private detectives in Kiel is not solely defined by thrilling cases but by real people and ordinary fates, it is refreshing to encounter a film that avoids clichéd murder plots and instead delves deeply into the psychology of its characters, presenting even the greatest of all fictional detectives as profoundly human.

Author: Gerrit Koehler   

 

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