When I was nine or ten, my father took me to the Jamaica
branch of the New York Public Library.
There I found and checked out a fat, stubby book containing all of Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle's accounts of the doings of Sherlock Holmes -- four novels
and fifty-six short stories. I read that
book from cover to cover, over and over, and the next December, for my Christmas
and birthday present, my parents gave me my own copy, bound in bright red. It was one of my most prized
possessions. As a young teen -ager, I
subscribed to The Baker Street Journal,
the publication of an organization of Holmes enthusiasts who styled themselves
"The Baker Street Irregulars" after the group of urchins who served
as Holmes' eyes and ears in the streets and alleyways of Victorian London.
At the Main Street Theater during those years, I saw many of
the fourteen films in which Holmes and Watson were portrayed by Basil Rathbone
and Nigel Bruce. It took me some while,
years later, to adjust to Jeremy Brett's more mannered interpretation of Holmes,
and I have never come to terms with Robert Downey Jr.'s utterly wrong reading
of the character and style of the great detective.
So it was with some uneasiness that I approached the latest
film interpretation, that of Ian McKellen in the newly released Mr. Holmes. McKellen, a splendid English actor now famous
as Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings
and Hobbit movies, plays an aged and
quite infirm Holmes who, at 92, is suffering from memory loss. He has for thirty years been living alone in
a country house looking after his bees, looked after by a series of
housekeepers. The current holder of that
thankless job, caring both for Holmes and for her young son, is played by Laura
Linney, who gives a beautiful reading of the part.
The movie is quiet, leisurely, patient -- as one must be
with the very old -- and simply lovely.
McKellen, who is actually 76, does equally well as the 92 year old
Holmes and as the 60 year old Holmes in a series of flashbacks to Holmes' last case,
which the 92 year old is struggling to recall.
It is a bravura piece of acting from old Gandalf, and as a one-time
Baker Street Irregular who has himself grown old, I recommend it to you.
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