Enola Holmes
Mystery | 123 Minutes | 2020 | United States
(2/4)
Director: Harry Bradbeer | Producers: Mary Parent, Alex Garcia, Ali Mendes, Millie Bobby Brown, Paige Brown | Screenplay: Jack Thorne | Based on: The Enola Holmes Mysteries: The Case of the Missing Marquess by Nancy Springer | Starring: Millie Bobby Brown, Sam Claflin, Henry Cavill, Helena Bonham Carter, Louis Partridge, Susie Wokoma, Adeel Akhtar | Music: Daniel Pemberton | Cinematographer: Giles Nuttgens | Editor: Adam Bosman
Enola Holmes (Millie Bobby Brown), the youngest sibling in the illustrious Holmes family, grew up for all intents and purposes as an only child. At the lavish country house which is now on the cusp of being consumed by nature, she was home-schooled by her mother, who provided an unorthodox education encompassing everything from word games, chess, and jujitsu to chemistry, botany, and lawn tennis played indoors.
This bucolic idyll is broken one summer on the morning of Enola’s sixteenth birthday, when she awakes to find that her mother has absconded with nary a word. Perhaps Enola has been bred for this: her name itself is a sort of cipher, which read backwards spells out ‘alone’. Nevertheless she bikes to the local train station, where the ravages of time and her unkempt attire force her to reintroduce herself to her two older brothers, the stuffy government official Mycroft (Sam Claflin) and the brilliant detective Sherlock Holmes (Henry Cavill).
The departure of Eudoria (Helena Bonham Carter) provides the impetus for the rest of the narrative, as the first in a series of broadly overlapping mysteries which aspire to the kaleidoscopic but bear instead the translucence of damp brown paper bags. Enola Holmes plays out like a Billy Mumphrey mystery: a story of love, deception, greed, lust, and unbridled enthusiasm, in which a simple country girl, a cockeyed optimist, gets caught up in a high-stakes game of world diplomacy and international intrigue.
When Enola herself absconds from impending boarding school drudgery and takes the train to London in search of her mother, she stumbles upon the Viscount Tewkesbury, Marquess of Basilwether (Louis Partridge) who falls right into her lap from an overhead baggage compartment. Tewkesbury with his floppy hair and raised eyebrows is on the run from a hired goon in a brown bowler. The twin mysteries of Eudoria and Tewkesbury cross paths and entwine around the House of Lords, political reform, and the radical suffragette movement.
Enola Holmes seems like a franchise in waiting, not least because the movie fails to accomplish much beyond an introduction to the title character by way of Millie Bobby Brown. Various plot threads especially concerning Eudoria and the suffragettes and all of the core relationships are left hanging.
Where there’s mystery to be solved, Enola stands a fighting chance of solving it, but the film spends little time contemplating the precise nature of her gift. She can unscramble basic ciphers and hunt for messages in the mail, but the leaps of faith and moments of analytic insight required to succeed at her task are shown through rapid cuts, like a jigsaw on threads being pulled together. The film counts on us getting the gist without caring too much about the nitty-gritty or the grace of the gesture.
Otherwise Enola relies on sage words of advice or vague snippets of foreboding when it comes to her decision-making in times of crisis. Some of these phrases are mere days old, more often they stretch back to her childhood, although burnished by the loss of her mother, Enola has hitherto failed to internalise any of them. Instead they strike her like bolts from the blue in moments of peril.
When Enola does find herself stuck at a finishing school for girls, the problem is solved not by cunning or wit but through a convoluted bout of room-hopping. The lushness of the Holmes residence and the vibrancy of the street scenes in London are not matched by many of the interiors, which feel muggy and half-formed. Enola can at least perform a mean corkscrew.
In the end Enola Holmes is less of a romp than we might expect, though still fairly light and easy viewing. That’s largely thanks to Millie Bobby Brown, who excels in the role, managing to overcome an at times impossibly twee script through the sheer exuberance of her personality. Victorian stuffiness wilts away in her presence, sometimes in spite of all the winks at the camera.
There is a plausible spark between Enola and Tewkesbury, and a fittingly fledgling sort of chemistry cultivated during the course of the film between Brown as Enola and Cavill as Sherlock, who strikes the balance between aloof and empathetic. Perhaps then Enola Holmes does serve like some of the best Victorian fiction, stilted but still leaving enough room to wonder.
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