Brief Movie Review: Mr. Holmes
Sep. 7th, 2015 06:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjIan McKellan playing a semi-senile Sherlock Holmes in retirement, trying to solve the mystery of his own past. Well, what can I say. Ian McKellan. He does a superb job of portraying an old man facing down his own mortality. I'm not sure if that makes him a great actor or a perceptive human being. The plot is a tangled confusion of three different stories that braid together tightly at the end, but the underlying theme seems to be one popular among modern takes on the Holmes legend: a refutation of the glory of pure (if sometimes arrogant) intellect in favor of the importance of subjective emotional negotiation.
Now I'm all in favor of the importance of subjective emotional negotiation myself, but I have to think that there's just a little meanness in the relentless assault on the essence of this icon of rationality. It would be simplistic to analyze Holmes as falling somewhere on the Aspergers spectrum, turning a single-minded attention to minute detail into a praiseworthy career skill. But I have to think that there are a lot of readers/viewers over the years who have seen in Holmes a vindication of the idea that you can make valuable contributions to society despite an apparent lack of emotional skills. So the apparent need that Holmes interpreters have to "humanize" the man by teaching him the lesson that rationality is nothing if you can't master social nuance as well seems to me to be stealing a literary hero from a fandom who have, historically, had few to glom onto.
That aspect aside, this was a painfully true portrait of a man whose identity has always revolved around his intellect, recognizing that age is in the process of stealing that intellect and both struggling against his fate and trying to accept it with the same rationality that he approached everything else. It's the story of a master finding a new apprentice to give the end of his life meaning. It's a clash of temporal cultures where a man solidly associated with old-world Edwardian culture finds himself dealing with the modern horrors of WWII. (By Holmes's fictional biography he would be in his 90s in the setting of this story.)
The staging and cinematography is gorgeous and while the viewer would be utterly lost without an understanding of general Holmesiana, there isn't any need to be familiar with any particular part of the canon. I found certain parts of the movie painful, but largely because I'm at an age where people I care deeply about are dealing with end-of-life issues and I have a number of emotional land-mines in that field. I guess I'd recommend this purely on the basis of: hey, Ian McKellan!
Now I'm all in favor of the importance of subjective emotional negotiation myself, but I have to think that there's just a little meanness in the relentless assault on the essence of this icon of rationality. It would be simplistic to analyze Holmes as falling somewhere on the Aspergers spectrum, turning a single-minded attention to minute detail into a praiseworthy career skill. But I have to think that there are a lot of readers/viewers over the years who have seen in Holmes a vindication of the idea that you can make valuable contributions to society despite an apparent lack of emotional skills. So the apparent need that Holmes interpreters have to "humanize" the man by teaching him the lesson that rationality is nothing if you can't master social nuance as well seems to me to be stealing a literary hero from a fandom who have, historically, had few to glom onto.
That aspect aside, this was a painfully true portrait of a man whose identity has always revolved around his intellect, recognizing that age is in the process of stealing that intellect and both struggling against his fate and trying to accept it with the same rationality that he approached everything else. It's the story of a master finding a new apprentice to give the end of his life meaning. It's a clash of temporal cultures where a man solidly associated with old-world Edwardian culture finds himself dealing with the modern horrors of WWII. (By Holmes's fictional biography he would be in his 90s in the setting of this story.)
The staging and cinematography is gorgeous and while the viewer would be utterly lost without an understanding of general Holmesiana, there isn't any need to be familiar with any particular part of the canon. I found certain parts of the movie painful, but largely because I'm at an age where people I care deeply about are dealing with end-of-life issues and I have a number of emotional land-mines in that field. I guess I'd recommend this purely on the basis of: hey, Ian McKellan!
