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'Mr. Holmes' Works, If You Ignore Sherlock

Mr. Holmes purports to be about Sherlock Holmes, but it presents us with a Sherlock Holmes in extreme old age, without a 221B Baker Street or a Dr. Watson, living in a rural area with no crime in sight, keeping bees.

What's worse, this Sherlock Holmes has lost so much of his mental faculties that he has to write his companions' names on his shirt cuffs and even loses track of his knowledge of bees, on unfortunate occasions. He is struggling with serious memory loss as he tries to write up the facts about the case that led him to retire from detective work. He wants to correct the romantic inaccuracies of Dr. Watson's accounts, but the story he comes up with is far more romantic and far less psychologically convincing than anything Watson wrote. I'm suspicious that his memory never brought out the truth, though the story he comes up with does make a certain amount of sense.

The real story here, in my judgment, is about a very old man and a very young boy, the son of housekeeper Laura Linney, and the practice of beekeeping. If you forget all about Sherlock Holmes, all three parts are admirably played, without cuteness or sentimentality on any side, and with human relations as complicated as the situation would be expected to bring out.The old man seems to have no social life at all, and the boy has no other male role model, and the mother is not so sure that all this bother about bees is very good for her son.

But even the great British actor Ian McKellen can't find Sherlock Holmes in this script, which leaves you with a not very clear story with two rather unsatisfactory endings, both of which will be greatly improved if you forget all about Sherlock Holmes and just concentrate on the characters and the acting.