Mr. Holmes (2015)

Ian McKellen stars as 93-year-old Sherlock Holmes. He has outlived Watson and everyone else from his past. His memory is fading. He struggles to remember the details of a case that he believes Watson recorded incorrectly.

The movie has three points of focus. The first is the present, which in this case is Great Britain after World War II. Holmes has left London and now lives in a house in the countryside near a beach. He has a housekeeper, Mrs. Munro (Laura Linney), who lives with him along with her son, Roger. Holmes splits his time between reminiscing and keeping bees. Every now and then he will start to remember something about the past and have a flashback.

One set of flashbacks relate to the case that he believes Watson misrepresented. Thomas Kelmot hired Holmes to follow his wife, Ann, and find out what she was up to. Thomas believed that Ann was getting ready to leave him for another man. What Holmes discovered was that she was getting ready to kill herself, using poison. Holmes confronted her and thought he had talked her out of doing so only to discover later on that she did so by another means.

The other set of flashbacks are to a trip he made to Japan since the end of the Second World War. He visits with Tamiki Umezaki, a man who claims that his father met Sherlock Holmes, in England. a few decades before. Holmes cannot remember meeting Umezaki's father.

What Holmes learns through the course of remembering bits of his past is the value of fiction. He was honest with Mrs. Kelmot but that didn't keep her from committing suicide. At the end of the movie he writes a letter to Mr. Umezaki telling him about what he "remembered" about his father.

I watched this movie in bits and pieces over the course of a month. I don't recall all the details clearly at this point, especially from the first first half-hour. I did find the final act to be very moving. I should probably give another watch at some point in the future.