Before I went to the theater to see Mr. Holmes, I probably thought that I would see this story: the old detective retired and returned to a peaceful rural life to solve the last wonderful case of his life. The hero is late, but he is still ambitious, and there is a little boy beside him who is his audience and the last witness to his legend.
In all fairness I'm going for Sherlock Holmes, one of my favorite teenage books; I'm also going for Sir Ian McKellen, the old man who played the famous men of many fictional worlds: King Lear , Gandalf the Grey, Magneto the old... and now he's going to be this legendary detective in a deerstalker hat - even though the detective is getting old and moving to the outskirts of Sussex to look after the bees, he still It's that fabled Sherlock Holmes, who can deduce the story of your life from the soot and mud in the soles of your shoes.
However, this is not a story about a famous detective. Or rather, it's a story about a famous detective, but it's not about his glorious experience. There's no intricate reasoning in this film, and no intricate case. Because all his stories have been rendered and embellished in Dr. Watson's retelling, and by countless people on the screen in various ways, they have become legends, and no one cares that the real detective is a person who does not wear A deer hat and a person who doesn't smoke a pipe.
But the story is indeed about solving a case, but it is a mystery that has been in the detective's heart for a long time. In the film, through the mouth of Mr. Holmes, we got the answer: this is a puzzle about loneliness.
Sherlock Holmes, portrayed by Conan Doyle, is a person with superior intelligence but very indifferent to emotion. He once said that "emotion affects the clear reason". He also despises love and rejects marriage. society. Sherlock Holmes has a highly logical brain, with a keenness and wisdom that ordinary people cannot match. However, this uniqueness is a kind of talent and a curse, which makes him stand out from the crowd, and is destined to spend his life in the company of loneliness. He has been proud all his life, but the hero is too late, he is full of wisdom, but suffers from Alzheimer's disease, he can't remember people's names, he forgets what he said a moment ago, he moves slowly, his hands tremble, and he eats and lives. Needing someone to take care of him, he became a lonely old man, closed in his study, trying to write the last case he was about to forget.
The only case in the film that really counts as a case is the last case that Holmes worked on before he retired, explained through intermittent flashbacks. It's just that different from the version modified by the good doctor, the great detective deduced the truth of the matter, but failed to save a woman who had lost her attachment to life and decided to commit suicide.
It was not until he retired to the countryside and remembered this old case that he realized his arrogance back then. Logic and facts are not always the driving forces of man, and sometimes the truth of a puzzle is not measured by reason; the mind is the least we can fathom.
The answer to this question is about the loneliness of geniuses that are not understood by the world, or the loneliness of old friends and relatives who go away before you and alone, or the loneliness of Alzheimer's patients who are isolated and abandoned. Possibly all three.
At the end of the film, the old detective sits on his knees on the edge of the chalk cliffs of Dover, laying stones on the green grass, and recites the names that have passed away: Watson, Mycroft, Mrs. Hudson, and the one he did not. Women who can be saved, worship them one by one. He may or may not have found some relief in Zen, we don't know.
But the story has ended there.
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