Enola Holmes

Title: Enola Holmes
Directed by: Harry Bradbeer
Screenplay by: Jack Thorne (based on a novel by Nancy Springer)
Network: Netflix

My favorite scene in Netflix’s YA breezy, light, fluffy and fun Nancy Drew-slash-Ferris Bueller knockoff “Enola Holmes” is when the black woman jiujitsu instructor in Victorian London turns and says directly into the camera: “Sherlock Holmes failed to dismantle the patriarchy.”

Which is to say, it’s a fun little adventure movie several cuts above your usual made-for-Netflix fare but my god is it horribly unsubtle with its out-of-place political posturing.

You could, you know, make a movie that inspires the audience to reevaluate the place and role of female characters in period dramas by doing what this movie does the other 90% of the time when it’s not having anachronistic hyper-modern women totally destroy those fuddy-duddy Victorian men with FACTS and LOGIC—i.e. by creating an enjoyable, engaging movie in which women happen to play all the central roles. That would do it, guys. That would get your point across. You don’t have to bring the action to a screaming to a halt just so someone can break the fourth wall and just say the premise straight to the audience.

It’s weird, it’s distracting, it detracts from what would otherwise be a ringing endorsement of more female-centric movies. Bah humbug get off my lawn.

Anyway. So. The actual movie. Enola Holmes is a fictional sub-creation of the blessedly copyright-free Sherlock (here played with marble stiffness and facial inarticulation by Henry Cavill), a supposed younger, precociously and spunky and plucky teenage sister of the big cocaine-addicted S, played with instantly adorable and delightful charm by Stranger Things’s Millie Vanilli Bobbie Brown Bel Biv DeVoe. With Sherlock and brother Mycroft (Sam Claflin) grown up and moved away, Enola is raised by her independent, eccentric domestic white terrorist mother Eudoria (Helena Bonham Carter) who speaks in inspirational poster homilies (“If you want to be heard, you’ve got to make some noise,” says the fey dearie as she builds pipe bombs to slaughter innocents).

All seems well until Mother disappears one day—ooh, a mystery, involving a Holmes, who would have guessed. Enola’s search takes her to London, and along the way stumbles across a plot to bump off the young, pale, slightly foppish but actually not really his personality is a bit of a mess honestly Marquess or Possibly Viscount of Somewhereorother (Louis Partridge and His Hair), in order to prevent said Lad Who Is Quite a Modern and Liberal Thinker from voting the wrong way on a historically inaccurate bill to give women the vote. Enola promptly stops looking for Mumsie (probably just as well, as this is not a terribly compelling arc) and resolves instead to save the Marquess (or Viscount) and His Hair. Aided by numerous and repeated flashbacks to Enola and Eudoria beating the hell out of each other at juijitsu, Enola solves the case, er, mainly by using jiujitsu to beat up and kill the assassin sent after the young Laird. Not much sleuthing going on, really.

Enola’s two talents appear to be decrypting messages that have been purposely fed to her in order for her to read, and dressing up as a boy. Because either the scriptwriters aren’t that good at coming up with clues and mysteries, or because (as I’ve whined about elsewhere) our society is currently incapable of thinking of any way to show strength other than beating people up.

Sherlock does show up once or twice, but is here mainly used for the “Worf effect”, that is having a supposedly intelligent character get out-thought by the protagonist in order to showcase just how gosh darned smart she is.

In between, Enola talks to the camera in the style and tone of Ferris Bueller, which doesn’t add much to either the plot or our understanding of the character, but hot damn, that Millie Bobbie Brown can charm the back legs of an Arcturan Megadonkey.

All this leads to the rousing climax in which Enola saves the Lord, gets women the vote several decades too early, and manifests her manifesto, declares her independence and sets up the sequel. Huzzah. 

And I’m being incredibly cynical about the whole thing, maybe because Generation X as a whole has been raised to view the world through the filters of irony and cynicism, maybe because I’m an incorrigible misanthrope, and yet this movie has moved me to wonder—is the English-speaking world finally moving past detachment and irony as its default and primary if not only means of interpreting the world? The bromides in this movie about equality and gender ring tinny and false in these tired, failing old ears, surely nobody could say this with a straight face, yet the movie’s single notable characteristic is how committed and sincere it is about everything. Could, my crusty old heart wonders, audiences actually mean it, sincerely mean it, sincerely enjoy having characters stand up and declaim their beliefs with outthrust jaws and beaten breasts? Are we (and as a terminally-repressed Englishman in Canadian disguise, I shudder at the prospect), are we on the cusp of a new era of genuine emotion?

People online have long bemoaned the death of satire, but few have considered what is taking its place, and I think I see now: Sincerity. Meaning what you say. No more “ironically” enjoying things that are objectively awful. No more sarcastically quipping lines you don’t believe in. No more sneering at genre tropes or cliches in shows or movies that consciously ape those tropes and hold them up to ridicule or else seek to subvert them.

A movie about a plucky, spunky teenage girl who is (A) plucky and (B) spunky and that’s it, that’s the whole thing, it revels in her terminal pluckiness overload and in her anaphylactic-shock-inducing abundance of spunk. It wears its applique-thin iron-on primary school philosophy on its sleeve and is proud of it, genuinely proud, is not afraid to bellow it into your face. So to me, the effort feels hopelessly misguided, because who my age takes philosophical moralizing in a movie aimed at teenage girls seriously, but I’m the one out of touch now, there’s a coming wave of genuine-ness and it wears the winsomely smiling face of Millie Bobbie Brown.