Mr. Holmes. A postmodern/poststructural look at a postmodernist film that behaves postmodernly because postmodernism is dumb.
By. Daniel Shultz
This review contains spoilers.
This review contains spoilers.
The
prevailing notion.
A bitter
better
Way to see
the changes that bring life to words.
Postmodernism is to know that you don’t no. (intentional
grammar mistake)
A way to
see that absolutes are no more than conventions. Such words bean only the
beaniest of contraptions, stifling the webs and morsels.
Laws are gone, hail to the temporality of morality.
I
Hate
Post
Well that
was chore. The absurd nonsense above would have gotten me high praise in my college
poetry class. Poetry and fiction writing were topics I thoroughly enjoyed
studying in college. I took poetry far more than I perhaps should have,
especially since I was a science major. The prevailing idea within these
classes was that form and structure were old fashioned and quaint, but early on
I had a professor who could appreciate both form and more abstract things. When
I took an advanced class I found that turning in my metered, rhyming poetry on
which I had spent a great deal of time was essentially laughed at. So I decided
to do an experiment, I wrote a poem in a more abstract nonsensical way. I had
done things like this before, but this time I wanted to see just how far people
would go to reject traditional poetry. I had a certain idea in mind about the
meaning of the poem but the words did very little to convey that message. The
response was enormous with people hailing it as the best thing I had done in
the class, some saying that it was far better than any of my other poems. This
whole thing served to illustrate to me the bankruptcy of postmodernism. Each
individual thought they were rebelling against “the system” in rejecting
classicalism but instead they had merely bought into the lie that there are no
absolutes and joined the masses on their march to Nihilism.
You might
wonder why I’ve started out this critique of a movie that claims to be about
Sherlock Holmes with a discussion of postmodernism and my aversion to it. The
answer is simple the very things that I detest about postmodernism, mainly its
rejection of absolute morality, is on full display in this abomination of a
film. As Christians we hold to the idea that morality stems from God’s holiness
and his moral law is a reflection and exposition of that holiness. This should
impact our worldview so much that we look at everything dealing through the lenses
of scripture. We should champion the cause of Christ and delight in God’s law, and
thus we cannot embrace the postmodern culture of death.
Mr. Holmes
is a 2015 British drama starring famed actor Sir Ian Mckellen and is based off
of a 2005 novel by American author Mitch Cullin. The film starts out innocent enough
albeit on sad note with an aging Holmes slipping into dementia. The main plot
revolves around Holmes’s desire to remember the last case he worked on and the
events that caused him to give up his detective work. He knows only that his
old friend John Watson embellished the story and changed the facts when he
wrote the details down. While Holmes is trying to accomplish this task of
remembering the case he befriends the son of his housekeeper and through the
friendship begins to remember details about the case.
On the
surface the plot seems to be a decent one, the idea of an aging Holmes solving
one last case while battling a failing mind is compelling, but by the end of
the film we see that this plot line is really just a façade used to obfuscate
the morality of the film.
The details
of the case that Holmes is striving to follow are presented through flashbacks.
We see that he was hired by a woman’s husband to follow her and discover why
she is acting so differently after having two miscarriages. Any intelligent
person could understand the woman’s depression but the film glosses over the
simple answer to the man’s problem, to simply seek out help, in order to have
Holmes follow the woman to various places and do “detecting.” Little is done by
way of deduction instead we see Holmes following the woman and seeing her do
suspicious things, which make it clear that she is preparing to kill herself.
Holmes finally confronts the woman revealing that he knows her plans and that she
needn’t do go through with them. The woman listens and then offers to run away
with Holmes. Holmes reluctantly declines, wishing that he could run away with
woman. The woman leaves and later kills herself.
Another
plot line is given in the film. Holmes is trying to combat his growing dementia
by trying various remedies, which leads him to Japan to find a certain type of
plant. The Japanese man who helps him reveals to Holmes that he had ulterior
motives in helping Holmes. It seems that the man’s father been a diplomat of
sorts to England. He ultimately had abandoned his family and written a letter saying
that he had spoken to Holmes, and that Holmes had said that he was needed in
some capacity in England and that the best course of action would be to leave
his family behind. Holmes bluntly tells the man that his father abandoned his
family and lied about speaking to Holmes in order to explain away the
abandonment.
As Holmes
remembers his last case a genuine touching story unfolds between the
housekeeper, her son, and Holmes. This plot line seems rather well done and
finds itself ruined by the last part of the film. After remembering his last
case he realizes that he quit detective work because he thought that his logic
had contributed to the woman’s death and he wished that he had run away with
her instead.
The film
presents this desire that Holmes had to run away with the woman as neutral, not
taking into account the adultery that would result from their actions. This
isn’t too unexpected of a thing in a modern film, as most people do not view
adultery as a sin. However the problems with the film’s morality do not stop at
that. Holmes realizes that Watson had changed the story to provide a
comfortable lie to the woman’s husband in order that he might not blame himself
for the woman’s death. Holmes comes to believe that these lies, both his
telling the woman that he did not want to run off with her and Watson’s lies
about the details of the case are preferable to the actual reality and facts.
Holmes then writes a letter to the Japanese man wherein he lies saying that he
had in fact remembered the encounter with the man’s father and that the man
served the British Empire faithfully and deeply missed his family. Holmes views
this as the same type of kindness that Watson had done for the woman’s husband.
This
culmination of the movie produced nothing in me but disdain and some simple
outrage that I had wasted my time. The postmodernity of the film is such:
mainly that true morality doesn’t exist beyond people’s own desires, that facts
and reality are nebulous concepts that ultimately hurt people and that lies are
a far better reality altogether. I find this moral lesson to be sickening. It
shows the degradation of our culture and the loss of critical thinking that
many people have failed to see this film for what it is, a display of the
rejection of God’s law and an embracing of postmodern apostasy.
I cannot in
good conscience recommend this film to anyone. If you want to see Sherlock
Holmes detecting and solving crimes watch anything other than this drivel.
I give the film 1½ stars out of 5.
Buy this instead of Mr. Holmes.
Buy this instead of Mr. Holmes.
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