REVIEW: MR HOLMES (dir. Condon)

'In form, Mr Holmes approximates the cosy contours of the biopic — there are choo-choo trains, Bentleys, starched collars and walled gardens  — except of course that Holmes is fictional and this lends the film some acuity as an act of literary deconstruction. In place of deerstalker and pipe, we get a top hat and cigar; the books, penned here by Dr Watson, are disdained as “penny dreadfuls with an elevated prose style” by Holmes, who, for an afternoon’s amusement, sits in the cinema, scoffing at the films made of his adventures. Even better is the small, furtive glance McKellen gives around the cinema, post-scoff, to check he hasn't drawn attention to himself — a lovely touch of scampishness in which his isolation can nevertheless be felt. This Holmes is selfish, boyish, privately panicked, sometimes cruel, each note played by McKellen with invisible fingers — the maestro barely touching the keys. Like many of our greatest Shakespeareans, his screen-career has been intermittent and late-breaking.  Olivier and Burton made it as young men, but on the whole Hollywood prefers to let English thespians simmer in their own juices until such time as they can be ‘discovered’ in middle age — ready-made institutions. Just add the right role and stir.  McKellan was a striking beauty as a young man, his face somewhere between the pouty impudence of Keith Richards and the low-lidded sultriness of Charlotte Rampling, but it wasn’t until 1993, when McKellan was 54, that Hollywood perked up. He appeared in four films that year, including a small part in Last Action Hero as Death, come to shuffle Arnold Schwarzenegger from this mortal coil. The link between Shakespeare and Schwarzenegger may not be immediately apparent, McKellan’s subsequent career illuminated a new path for RSC-trained actors in the brave, new wonderland of digital special effects, in which the very laws of physics seen to shimmer on command: providing the voices with the authority of issuing those commands.' — from my review in Intelligent Life