Mr Holmes (PG)

four stars

Dir: Bill Condon

With: Ian McKellen, Laura Linney, Milo Parker

Runtime: 104 minutes

NEVER mind that CBE conferred on Benedict Cumberbatch for swishing around sporting a quizzical look playing Sherlock. A better sign of one's status as a bona fide national treasure is the plain old title of mister. Think of Mr Bond, Mr Kipling, and the famous consulting detective himself, Mr Holmes, here played in exquisitely fine fashion not by the otter faced one but by Ian McKellen (who is also a Sir no less; take that, Cumberbatch).

Adapted from Mitch Cullin's novel A Slight Trick of the Mind, Bill Condon's period drama finds Holmes well into his twilight years, when he is not so much raging against the dying of the light as doddering towards it. Long retired to Dover, the one time Baker Street legend lives in a seaside cottage where he tends to his bees and is looked after by a housekeeper, Mrs Munro (Laura Linney) and her young son, Roger (Milo Parker).

Taking its cue from the setting, Condon's picture is as relaxing and soothing to the soul as a summer fortnight by the sea. Do not wash up on these shores if you are looking for a flash, gimmicky, BBC television version of Sherlock in which text messages flash on the screen and solutions are only ever a mouse click away. With the film set in 1947, McKellen's Mr Holmes is no more au fait with the internet than he is with Martians. Logic, pure and simple, is the chief weapon in the Holmesian armoury - for good, and ill.

When we meet the elderly Holmes he has just returned from a trip to Japan, where he ventured in search of a special plant he hopes will restore his fading faculties. A worry to his doctor (Roger Allam), an increasing burden on his housekeeper, Holmes only remains a hero to his fans, who write to him urging him to take up their hopeless cases, and Roger, who particularly loves it when Holmes does "that thing" of deducing myriad facts from the first impression of a person. You know the sort of thing: by the grains of sand in your turn-ups I can see you have recently fled the Foreign Legion, etc.

Holmes does not answer the letters from fans because he is retired. It was his last case that did for his career, but he is darned if he can remember why or how. He is darned if he can remember much now. When Roger urges him to finish the story he has started on the case (with Watson gone it is now his old mucker picking up the fountain pen), Holmes has to piece together fragments from his memory, and so the tale of the sad lady wearing rose perfume begins to unfold.

Star and director have walked this path together before in Gods and Monsters (1998), in which McKellen played James Whale, the director of the Frankenstein movies. Some two decades on, the role of a fading force fits McKellen even better. Then again, when is the good knight ever bad in anything? Here, he infuses Holmes with the usual silky grace, but there is so much more depth to the character. Here is a fictional being made flesh and blood, a man with sorrows that cannot be dispatched by the swift, merciless application of logic.

Flashing back and forth from 1947 to the case of the blonde lady 35 years before, and weaving in a plot strand from Japan for good measure, the tale takes its own sweet time to unfold, but this viewer for one was never bored. There is much here to enjoy, from the beautifully realised post-war setting to the unfolding relationships on screen. In Linney, as with Lynn Redgrave in Gods and Monsters, McKellen has an acting partner worthy of him. Mrs Munro, too, has her hidden depths, and Linney is a joy to watch as she reveals them, one wistful glance and brief but telling speech at a time. Milo Parker, bouncing between the two in his own endearing way, is a lucky, and talented, young actor indeed.