Review: Mr. Holmes (2015)

Director: Bill Condon

Runtime: 104 minutes

I finally got around to watching Mr. Holmes on Netflix. The film, based on Mitch Cullin's 2005 novel A Slight Trick of the Mind, focuses on an elderly Sherlock Holmes struggling to come to terms with senility.   Holmes retired from the detective business decades prior to the events of the film, and has decided to write the true account of his last case, the one that drove him from London to a quiet life of beekeeping.  Unfortunately, his memory is fading, and he has trouble remembering details, though he is helped along by the housekeeper's precocious son. 

I've always found Sherlock Holmes fascinating.  Not the character, per se, or even the Doyle stories. I have a soft spot for metafiction and the crossover between pop culture and history (cf. my review of Dan Simmons's The Fifth Heart, where Sherlock Holmes teams up with Henry James), so this seemed right up my alley.  I was underwhelmed. 

Without divulging too much, the central mystery of the film (what were the details of Holmes's last case, and why did it cause him to quit for good) doesn't have a satisfactory resolution.  The resolution is unambiguous, but unconvincing, for while I can understand Holmes's distress, for a man who is routinely involved with murder and espionage, this isn't nearly enough to justify his response.  Meanwhile, Holmes's relationship with the housekeeper's son Roger is touching, but not something that we haven't seen a million times before, even if the acting, from both McKellan as Holmes and Milo Parker as Roger, is above average.

As a Sherlock Holmes story, it's uninteresting.  As a story about aging and mortality, it's sweet but unoriginal.  As a comment on the Sherlock Holmes mythos (of, as the poster says, "the man beyond the myth") it's a real letdown, as it doesn't really add anything except to point out that well-known misconceptions (e.g. the deerstalker) are misconceptions, or to ask "what if Sherlock Holmes were old?" 

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

Review: The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons (2015)

Simmons' The Fifth Heart falls into the niche genre of Sherlock Holmes pastiche, which is itself generally a genre-mixing of historical fiction and Sherlock Holmes mystery, often involving real historical figures or other pre-existing fictional characters.  The most famous of this surprisingly voluminous genre is probably Nicholas Meyers' The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1974), where Holmes and Freud team-up after Holmes' supposed death at Reichenbach Falls.  This three year period between the publication of The Final Problem (1891) and The Empty House (1894), referred to as the Great Hiatus, is also the backdrop for Simmons' novel, where Holmes meets Henry James on the bank of the Seine, as both had picked that spot to end their lives.  As intriguing as a Henry James/Sherlock Holmes team up may be on its own, there's another oddity about this Holmes pastiche:  Sherlock Holmes has deduced that he's a fictional character. Self aware characters are hard to do well, but Simmons' method here is extremely clever.  The central conceit of the original Holmes stories is that they are true accounts written by Dr. Watson.  Unfortunately, Doyle was never big on fact checking, or even making sure character names and descriptions were consistent across stories.  When the location of Watson's war wound shifts from his shoulder to his leg, among other things, Holmes starts down the path that leads him to question his own existence.

It is amid this metaphysical backdrop that Holmes and James sail to America to help solve two cases.  The first is whether the suicide of Clover Adams, wife of Henry Adams and member of the elite social circle, the Five of Hearts, was actually a murder.  The other is to stop an international anarchist conspiracy to incite a world war.  James, as a close friend of Henry Adams and the other three surviving members of the five of hearts (John Hay, Lincoln's former secretary, John's wife Clara, and geologist/explorer Clarence King), is Holmes' way in to the Washington social elite.

Simmons is an incredible researcher, and creates an amazing atmosphere with his descriptions of D.C. in the gilded age.  Most of the characters in this novel are real people, mostly writers and politicians ranging from Theodore Roosevelt to Mark Twain. Early on, Simmons sets up a plotline with the narrator directly addressing the reader, suggesting that he has some private source of information for this account, and that the narrator might become a character in and of itself.  Unfortunately, Simmons doesn't follow through on this.

My feeling reading this novel changed between the first and second halves, and I found myself thinking of my experience reading two of Simmons' earlier novels, Hyperion (1989) and its sequel, The Fall of Hyperion (1990).  The mysteries Simmons creates are so engrossing that their solutions always seem like a let-down.

Rating: ★★★☆☆

An Interview with Arthur Conan Doyle

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is a difficult man to understand. He created Sherlock Holmes, one of the most enduring characters in popular fiction, and redefined an entire genre in a way that's still felt over a century later.  The mystery genre became a matter of rational inquiry and deductive reasoning.  Which is why people are often surprised to discover Doyle's later obsession with the supernatural.  Doyle was friends with Houdini, who spent many years debunking fraudulent mediums and mystics.  Doyle and Houdini had a falling out when Doyle refused to concede that Houdini did not have supernatural powers, and was merely an illusionist, despite Houdini's explanations.  

While the rational Holmes and the mystic Doyle may seem irreconcilable to us, Doyle didn't see it that way.  Embedded here is a 1927 film interview with Doyle, where he explains the origins of Holmes and his own interests in spiritualism.