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.
> who in 2020 could possibly disagree with it?
ReplyDeleteI really, really, really wish I agreed with you that this was an anachronistic concern. But with two very young daughters I’m of the belief that the pendulum is swinging in entirely the wrong direction and with rather a concerning amount of mass behind it. I’ll take every little thing that reinforces to my children what really should be obvious.
Haven’t watched this yet, plan to at some point. My eldest at 4 is probably too young for it.
I was going to write exactly what Jon posted above. I've got two girls, aged 6 and 8, and while there's certainly lip-service to the idea girls are just as good as boys, there's a huge amount of underlying social and cultural pressure to the contrary.
ReplyDeleteI disagree for a different reason. I think the message needs to be taught to each new generation along with everything else children need to learn. The movie was cute and I'm sure the target audience (13-year-old girls) enjoyed it. My beef was the portrayal of the teenage Lord Whatshisname. Does having a strong female lead mean we need a weak male in the supporting role?
ReplyDeleteI was more concerned that all of the enlightened women in the film were in on a domestic terrorism plot, which they would have conceivably carried out if the vote hadn't gone the way they wanted. Not a great look. They could have been smuggling banned books or something, but they decided to go with gunpowder and bombs so they could have some action set pieces.
ReplyDeleteI agree about the merits of the film, but I think you're giving it less credit than it deserves on the villain front. First, because as several others have already pointed out, the ideas that Enola espouses are by no means treated as a matter of course today. As we speak the Republicans have nominated to the supreme court a woman who cloaks herself in the mantle of feminism while clearly intending, as the pithy expression has already pointed out, to walk through every door that real feminists opened for her and close them behind her.
ReplyDeleteSecond, and more importantly, while Enola's opponents are sexist pigs, they are not the ultimate villains of the movie. These are anti-reformists, hoping to prevent the expansion of the vote. Here I think the film is being a great deal subtler than you've acknowledged (and than I might have expected). When we meet the villain, she's presented as not merely kind, but her arguments are seductive. I bristled a little at "this part of England was given to us", but I also assumed that the writers of the movie weren't expecting me to immediately think of the enclosure of the commons. Even Enola is at least a little won over, making a diplomatic answer where elsewhere she might have spoken her mind clearly.
And then this woman turns out to be a monster, who is willing to kill her only grandchild (and who has already murdered her son) to keep the vote out of common (men's) hands. Which means that Enola Holmes does something that a lot of historical dramas fail to do - recognize that one can be personally pleasant and likable while still possessing odious views and working to enact them. We're used to political villains in historical fiction being like Mycfort - personally obnoxious as well as politically so. This film not only gives us a murderous, classist grandma, it takes the time to skewer Holmes himself, who is clear-eyed enough to see his sister's intelligence, but completely uninterested in expanding that recognition to women as a whole.
And finally, we have the idea of a violent suffragist group, which is bold precisely because it plays with our sympathies. I don't imagine that future films will actually reveal that Enola's mother is a terrorist, but the idea that a sympathetic character might turn to violence in pursuit of justice is one that few children's entertainments are willing to consider.
Jon, Deej, Paul: I certainly agree that "girls can be as clever as boys" is a worthwhile message, one worth relitigating with every generation. It is, as I say, true, and its truth is important. But that wasn't really what I was talking about in this brief review, and it certainly wasn't why I found the film unsatisfying. It seemed to me that its treatment in this text was dramatically one-dimensional and inert, and that vitiated things that a movie ought to be (for instance: a string of actually thrilling adventures, genuine peril and tension and excitement, a staging in which we felt real investment etc). Of course I very much take the point that I'm not the target audience here, which in itself might be thought simply to invalidate my response.
ReplyDeleteAbigail: your more thoughtful reaction gives me pause. I suspect you're (maybe) overthinking the moral geometry of the movie, which I'd suggest puts much more of a spotlight on Burn Gorman's leering assassin, trying to drown Enola in a barrel of chasing her on the train; and on Fiona Shaw's cruel headmistress (with, it seems, a hopeless crush on Mycroft) than on the ancestral wickedness of the Tewkesburys, I think. Or to come at the question another way: the progressive elements you argue for are, perhaps, rather undercut by the more fundamental premise of the movie as such: that it's wonderful and fitting that our heroine grows up in a gigantic mansion, and that the hot boy she falls for is not just good-looking and sensitive and really into her but also a peer of the realm, who also grew up in a gigantic mansion.
"... vitiated things that a movie ought to be ..." I mean, the thing that a movie like this ought to be.
DeleteMy point is that I'm not suggesting this film needs to be Ibsen, or something. It's a YA popcorn adventure flick, and that's valid. But such a flick ought to generate tension and excitement, make you wonder how things will turn out etc, and I don't think this film did.
I read that the Doyle estate is suing Netflix because the portrayal of Sherlock in this movie matches the character's personality in the last ten stories, which are still under copyright.
ReplyDeleteWatching this, along with a number of other recent movies, did make me wonder if we are not seeing something a generational shift from a gen x style that defaults to cynicism to a newer sensibility that revels in moral clarity. Like, say, a Superman movie or a Jacky chan actioner or John Wick, perhaps the fun is in seeing baddies get their deserved comeuppance?
ReplyDeletehttps://one-way-mirror.blogspot.com/2020/10/enola-holmes.html