Enola Holmes is OK: handsomely mounted, with a charming, energetic performance from Millie Bobby Brown as the would-be consulting detective girl scion of the Holmes family and decent support from ‘toss a coin to your Sherlock’ Henry Cavill and Sam ‘Oswald Mycroft’ Claflin. The plot is bobbins and the mystery and its resolution nonsensical, but that hardly matters: everything bounces along nicely. Nonetheless I found myself disliking it quite strongly. I’ll tell you why.
At the heart of this story is an idea: that girls can be as clever as boys and should be allowed to choose how they live their lives. Our heroine embodies this idea; stacked against her are the various baddies who believe girls are inferior to boys and should be disciplined into submission and readied for one thing only, marriage. This idea—that girls are not intrinsically inferior to boys—is manifestly true. But it is dramatically inert. I mean, who in 2020 could possibly disagree with it? Of course it’s true. A drama predicated on it might have had bite a hundred years ago, but now it feels like it's fighting an antique battle.
To be clear, I'm arguing that the problem lies not in this idea's social or ethical truth but rather its dramatic vapidity. Enola is likeable and her antagonists are vile. There’s no nuance here. “Girls are as clever as boys” is not a story, it’s a default. Compare Enola’s asides to camera—sprightly and well-delivered though they are—with Fleabag’s same (slightly unfair to compare a YA adventure spritz to an adult comedy-drama, but still). Fleabag has the courage to make its protagonist charming, compelling, insightful and broken, needy, often unlikeable. Friction in her drama is provided not by gurning moral-monsters but actual people, some understandably alienated by Fleabag, others caught up in their own lives, selfish and real. The original Sherlock Holmes characterisation is similar, if sketchier; brilliant and obnoxious, compelling and distant. As a result these characters and their stories acquire dramatic heft and audience commitment and belief.
It’s not that there’s no depth to Enola Holmes (there isn’t—but this is popcorn fun not Sophocles, which is fine) it’s that there’s no real tension, that the film can’t squeeze actual excitement or peril or thrills from its adventure conventions. Drama is more than lots of things happening one after the other against a background of Edwardian props and settings.
