It turns out that the deerstalker hat and pipe were fictitious embellishments that Dr. Watson added to his tales of the world’s greatest detective, but it’s all a little irrelevant as since he has long to get married and Sherlock Holmes is now in his dotage and retired to live in the peace and quiet of the English countryside. The year is 1947 and the 90 year-old has just returned from a trip to a devastated war-torn Japan in search of ‘prickly ash’ which he believes will help stall the onset of dementia.

Life should be idyllic for him in his rather grand isolated house overlooking the English Channel where all he has to do is look after his bees, whilst he in turn is looked after his war-widow Housekeeper and Roger her 11 year old son. Holmes is troubled as he desperately wants to try his own hand at writing about his very last case before he dies.  It happened some thirty years and his memory is fading fast and he has difficulty remembering vital parts of the mystery although he thinks it all ended badly enough to cause him to hastily retire.

Holmes and Roger bond, much to the dismay of his mother who doesn’t want her son to get too attached as she thinks the job will be short lived due to the advanced age of her employer.  The old man however teaches the boy beekeeping and also shares with him pages of his new manuscript after he has managed to recall another part of his last case.

The movie flits back and forth from London in the 1920’s when Holmes had been commissioned by a distressed husband to track down his wife who he thinks is taking illicit music lessons.  It is naturally much more complicated than that and when the story flashes forward to the present time Holmes gradually remembers where the case went horribly wrong.

The ‘case’ itself and the real reason why he had recently gone to Japan are actually very lightweight plots, but that is hardly a hindrance for the movie which is essentially such to show us the great detective Holmes as portrayed by Ian McKellen one of the greatest British actors of his generation.  Two quintessential Englishmen : they are an ideal match. His Holmes is still shrewd and sharp (albeit a tad slow) but he is also very compassionate and emotional, which is a side we have never ever seen before.

Sir Ian is, as always, totally pitch perfect, although it does take a minute or two to adjust to the flashbacks as he still looks pretty old, but this is a minor distraction to a wonderful period piece of the kind that the Brits still really excel at. Laura Linney has little to do as the unhappy Housekeeper, but the talented Hattie Morahan is very touching as the Wife that Holmes has to trace, and naturally teenager Milo Parker manages to steal several of his scenes as Roger.

The movie re-unites Sir Ian with director Bill Condon who won an Oscar the last time they worked together (‘Gods and Monsters’). He and fellow Americans screenwriter Jeffrey Hatcher working from the original novel by Mitch Cullin make the emphasis of the story much more about the man himself than the cases he solved and the people involved. It made for a really refreshing change to have some personal insight that his creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would never ever have dreamed of back then over 100 years ago. By gad…. we Brits just wouldn’t have talked about that sort of thing.