The Strange Case
of Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle
Director: Cilla Ware
Year: 2005
Rating: 6.0
A BBC
film about a critical juncture in the life of Arthur Conan Doyle. This was
much better than I expected. I feared one of those horrible docu-dramas but
it is a full on well-acted drama. It comes at a nice time because I began
re-reading all the Holmes-Doyle short stories for the first time in a very
long time in between other things I am reading. Take a break from that book
and read Sherlock for a bit. Some feel very familiar to me, but there are
others that I am fairly certain I never read for some reason or have just
forgotten. Perhaps the ones I remember best are ones I have seen TV shows
on. But I had forgotten what a good writer Watson-Doyle was. The crimes and
their solutions are fine but Doyle sets them in surroundings that we can
see.
This begins with Doyle (Douglas Henshaw)
at a cross-roads. He is wealthy and famous for his Holmes stories, but a
certain dissatisfaction has crept in. He is tired of Holmes and tired of
his success. He is also writing numerous historical novels and short stories
and they are basically ignored. His father has died in a mental asylum, his
wife has come down with tuberculosis which back then was almost a certain
death sentence and he feels lost. So against everyone's advice including
his mother and wife, he kills Holmes. And seemingly people back then were
as crazy as they are now as he receives many death threats for doing so.
People wear black arm bands in mourning. He knocks off other books and gets
little satisfaction. He goes off to the Boer War to attend the injured (he
had been trained to be a doctor). And he writes The Hound of the Baskerville.
Which is where this ends. As best as I can tell this generally sticks to
the facts. Even the woman (Emily Blunt) that he has a platonic relationship
with until his wife dies and then marries is true.
But how it gets at them gives the film a
kick. His publisher wants Doyle to help an author write a biography about
himself. The man probes Doyle - forces him to dig deep into his past about
his father and his mother (Sinéad Cusack) taking up with another man.
How he turned to his professor Dr. Bell (Brian Cox) as a father figure and
the model for Holmes. How much Holmes is a part of him. This part is fiction
but an interesting device to delve into the physiological. 90 minutes.
