Sherlock Is Like Santa Claus Ian McKellen

“Where there is no imagination there is no horror”.

It’s fascinating to see how Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective continues to inspire authors, screenwriters, and filmmakers after all these years.

Recently there has been an abundance of “origin” stories on cinema screens, particularly in the flourishing super-hero movie genre, but Mr. Grappling with the diminishing powers of his mind, he tries to pen a rebuttal of the fanciful writings on him by his former cohort, John Watson, while recounting an unsolved case involving a young woman. Holmes and Roger, both of them with unusually bright intellects, are well matched.

Here is a deceptively sublime film, one which begins by approaching an artist of a different kind in his late period, one who believes acutely that “one shouldn’t leave this life without a sense of completion”. Know going in, that these are no old-time thriller cases, but mysteries of heart and soul, no less stirring or compelling.

Mr Holmes is a rumination on age, on memory and – at the end of Holmes’ life – on what love might have been. Condon’s skill with creating an identity for his films while avoiding fussiness can’t be denied; the downside of this directness is that the story tends to just move from point A to point B, rather than build or tighten or tense up. He never wore that silly, pointed hat and preferred cigars over that curved pipe. “Watson made all of that up”, Sherlock tells him, “in his penny dreadfuls with an elevated prose style”.

Milo Parker’s Roger is not almost there on the level of Asa Butterfield in Scorsese’s Hugo in terms of a young actor keeping pace with an old thespian, but he is charming without being cute and smart on a reasonable level. There is the true story, found in Sherlock’s papers, of a visit of a man concerned about his wife.

Mr. Holmes speaks volumes about the man through small details: a fall from bed, a pair of bees encased in a glass paperweight, a glove in a long-forgotten drawer. Mystery number two.

Don’t expect a good deal from that. His performance in the first two time periods – 1930s London and post-Hiroshima Japan – is what you would expect out of him: studied, eloquent, perceptive. Still, the gentle humanism on display – mixed with a deftness of touch by director Bill Condon – is something, and we can be grateful for a quietly assured work of craftsmanship this summer.

Ian McKellen’s performance of Sherlock Holmes can’t be faulted however. Like his Oscar-nominated portrayal of Hollywood director James Whale in Gods and Monsters, here McKellen plays another fading icon with aplomb, delivering a great mix of poise, vulnerability, humour and pathos. McKellen shuttles back and forth between the two like the master he is.

From the painterly shots of sweeping gardens to the narrative’s slow, delicate burn, “Mr. Holmes” is consummately graceful, and a glorious rebound for a filmmaker who oddly, if somewhat excitingly, opted to wrap up the bumbling “Twilight” saga.