Sherlock Holmes faces his greatest case: his own mortality

28 August 2015 - 10:26 By ©The Daily Telegraph

Mr Holmes gives us a Sherlock we've never seen before. He's 93, retired on the Dover coast, and starting to lose those legendary marbles. And he's played, both at this enfeebled age and 35 years before that, by Ian McKellen. Bee-keeping has become the former sleuth's all-consuming hobby. McKellen, with that gluey and astonishingly resonant voice of his, sounds very much as though he's been gargling honey for the bulk of a century.Adapting a 2005 novel, A Slight Trick of the Mind, by the American writer Mitch Cullin, Jeffrey Hatcher's script is all about contrasting the "real" Holmes with the one of Dr Watson's fabrication. It's a pretend biopic, which imagines 221B Baker St's beaky resident as a man impudently misrepresented by his myth."Penny dreadfuls with an elevated prose style," Holmes sniffs of his literary exploits. In the film's most in-jokey sequence, he even toddles along to a black-and-white matinee called The Lady in Greyand watches himself played, in a joyous little casting coup, by Nicholas Rowe, the star of 1985's Young Sherlock Holmes.The film lacks the jumped-up speed and ingenuity of TV's Sherlock . This is Holmes intentionally slowed down to a hobbling, reflective, end-of-life pace - and dare we call it refreshing? It's a film to rummage around in, picking up old clues, considering their meaning, and turning them in your palm.McKellen, a rummager par excellence, goes to town here like a one-man band playing all the greatest hits. His performance has a rich musicality, throwing out a host of baritone notes and making them harmonise: he can be sour and contemptuous, rheumy and self-pitying, a bit of a fraud.Responding to his nonsense with a kind of matronly exasperation, Laura Linney does well with a soft, unpatronising regional accent, and buoys the film up as a perfect foil. ..

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