Mr. Holmes

What role can a child play in a person’s ageing?

To what extent can affection and intellectual stimulation help reduce cognitive decline?

Questions that are helped to be answered by a film, based on Mitch Cullin’s book A Slight Trick of the Mind.

The film tells the story of Sherlock Holmes, the famous private detective, who is old and shabby and has been living for 35 years in Sussex, in a country house, cared for by Mrs. Munro, the housekeeper.

The 93 years weigh heavily on Holmes, mainly because of the inexorable memory decline that prevents him from recalling details that would help him answer two questions:

Why did he decide 35 years earlier to retire to the country after the last case?

The film tells the story of Sherlock Holmes, the famous private detective, who is old and shabby and has been living for 35 years in Sussex, in a country house, cared for by Mrs. Munro, the housekeeper.

The 93 years weigh heavily on Holmes, mainly because of the inexorable memory decline that prevents him from recalling details that would help him answer two questions:

• Why did he decide 35 years earlier to retire to the country after the last case?
• Why can he remember almost nothing about that investigation?

Of one thing the detective is quite sure: the version of the case published by Watson in a book and later taken up in a film does not match the facts.

So, Holmes engages in a real battle against time to slow the deterioration of his memory, trying to obtain foods that can help him resist ageing.

So, he begins to farm honey to procure Royal Jelly; then, not completely happy with the results, he even travels to Japan to find pepper flower, a berry widely used in the East as a spice and credited with beneficial effects on memory.

But the decisive help to the retrospective investigation comes from little Roger, Mrs Munro’s son who lives in her house: a strong relationship has developed between the two over time, made up of affection and intellectual affinity.

Will the elderly detective be able to solve the case?

I will not be the one to unveil the mystery, but that is not what really matters. Why?

Well, watch the trailer, and then we will discuss it.

How to watch the film

The story is not so much interesting for the outcome as for the journey.

The film shows a man, beautifully performed by Ian McKellen, fighting against time to combat an intellectual decline that prevents him from bringing back to memory the details of that last case; a case he does not remember having solved and that his assistant, the trusty Watson, has narrated in a book quite implausibly.

Little Roger’s role is central to the whole story; he is the one who stimulates the recollection, who asks questions that memory cannot answer, and who gives constant support to the search for truth.

It is during the investigation that Holmes comes face to face with the reality he had buried: that of an intellectual arrogance that led him to slam in people’s faces the way things were, without any empathy or care for the suffering he might generate, caring only about gratifying his ego.

What you will be able to observe in the story is a man who will have the strength, at the end of his life, to acknowledge his mistakes and reconcile with them, avoiding the escape that 35 years earlier had led him to retire to the countryside.

A strength he would hardly have found without the love of little Roger.

Must-see, more than once.

Cast

Ian McKellen, Laura Linney, Milo Parker, Hattie Morahan, Hiroyuki Sanada, Patrick Kennedy, Roger Allam