Mr Holmes - 2015

I liked it. It is very sad and slow for a while, but it has the most important thing: a good ending, touching and sweet and meaningful and right. Ian McKellen is great, but that’s no surprise :-) 

The story goes back and forth in time but it’s never confusing. In the present we see a very old Sherlock Holmes who needs supervision and who’s forgetting more and more things. It is sad, even more so because he is somehow alone. A housekeeper and her young son leave with him, and only now he starts feeling some affection for the boy Roger who proves to be a smart kid, but his mother doesn’t approve their friendship and would like to go away. She’s sad, and scared, because her husband had ambition and died in the war, while his ambition-free friends came back.

A recent flashback shows us Sherlock’s trip to Japan to collect an herb that might improve his memory (in 1947, Sherlock and Mr Umezaki pick up some plants or dirt or whatever in a dead field in Hiroshima…). When Umezaki reveals that he blames Sherlock for causing pain to him and his mother (showing him a letter where his father wrote that the great SH had advised him to leave his family and stay in England forever), Sherlock simply replies that he never met the man and that the letter was probably an excuse from a man who wanted to change his life and abandon his family.

The other flashbacks takes us back thirty years or so, to his last case. He knows that Watson’s story about that case can’t be right, it makes no sense at all, but he can’t remember what really happened, and throughout the film he tries to put things together and solve the mystery of what went so wrong that he decided to retire.

I liked this case, and the fact that I saw more here that Sherlock did :-D As he puts the pieces together we see a husband asking Sherlock’s help to find out what his wife is doing. He says she really wanted to have children, got pregnant twice and both time she lost her babies. He says she’s  so devastated ‘as if’ she actually lost two children ( ! can you believe the man?!?) , and that she had the insane idea of buying two tombstones for them but he disagreed. He says he suggested her taking up music and that she got very much into it, but that then she changed somehow and once he even heard her call out the names of the children. After that ‘he decided’ she had to stop the lessons altogether and forget about it, and that he didn’t gave her money anymore and forbid her to go to her music teacher (I mean, do I need to comment on that?!? the man!!!) . Sherlock started following her, but the husband did too and he busted into the teacher’s apartment sure that she was there and ‘demanding’ that she’d be given to him! Sherlock tells him to stop and leave the job to him. When Sherlock reaches the street again thinking he might have lost her given all the time he lost with the husband, he finds her outside looking at a taxidermy window shop (taxidermy? a young sad woman with no pets? come on) , and follows her: he sees her buying a poison, asking about their will, forging her husband’s signature to get money from the bank, and paying a mysterious man… I didn’t think for one second that she wanted to kill her husband, that would have made no sense given the character: she had a devastating sadness, not a murderous anger, come on! When he sees her sitting on a bench he approaches her and starts talking to her. Soon she tells him his tricks don’t work on her because she knows exactly who he is: she does the laundry in the house, of course, and she found his card on her husband’s jacket pocket. Still, they talk some more: Sherlock understood that she was playing a part to see if he would have believed she wanted to kill her husband or if he would have understood that she loved her husband and yet felt so so lonely, so unbearably lonely… he understands loneliness but he says that logic is enough for him. Before going away she throws away the poison she bought, and he’s satisfied of his work and goes home. Would you have been? I think that another woman would have understood there, would have said something more, tried something more, because that simply could NOT be enough. It’s like her first-hand-sadness left place to a deep deep depression, and you don’t beat depression simply because of logic reasons! I know lots  of logic reasons not to be depressed, and that only makes me feel worse, which makes me feel more guilty, which makes me feel even worse…

Anyway, Sherlock was surprised and profoundly shocked when she killed herself, walking in front of a train. I wasn’t. She reunited with her children. She had nobody to talk to, nobody who could understand, nobody who wanted to understand…and when she asked him if they could share their loneliness together he told her to go back to her husband instead!  After her death, we see three tombstones she paid for: one for her and one for each of her children. 

Sherlock could not get over it, he failed her completely, he had realized all the cold logic details of her actions, but not her. He couldn’t go on like that, so he retired and never worked again. 

——————

In the present: Sherlock and Roger become more and more fond of each other. When he finds the child unconscious with many stings on his face and body he immediately calls an ambulance, but doesn’t even think of telling his mother. She finds out by herself. Not because he’s mean, but because by cold logic it wasn’t necessary, so he thought of necessary things first.

Of course Roger doesn’t die, that would have been utterly unacceptable, no but on that, and Sherlock tells the woman that he cares about Roger and intends to leave to the two of them his house after he dies. The house, the ground, everything, and tells her therefore not to leave like she intended to do. From her face I say she appreciates the words and the sentiment and the prospect of being the owner, and also the fact that he’s not cold and heartless as she thought he was.

He understands that to save Ann’s life he should have done more, even lying if necessary, that the cold truth might not always be the best answer, so he writes to Umezaki telling him a made-up story about his father serving boldly and proudly the British Empire.

Now, it might be a good gesture towards a man who grew up without a father and whose mother recently died, but I’m not convinced that lies would have saved Ann. Had she spotted a lie it would have made things even worse. She needed understanding, is what she needed, and understanding company. She needed a comforting hand that would not go away. She needed someone to talk to about what she felt, when the emptiness in her soul threatened to explode, someone who would not judge her but listen to her and hold her hand. 

Anyway, he has now found some peace and can spend the rest of his days in his house with Roger and his mother. 

A good film, good characters, good acting from everyone, lots of feelings.

ITA Mr. Holmes - il mistero del caso irrisolto