by our new Italian contributor Elisa Giudici
It's been a while since a Netflix film prompted me to write in my cinephile What's App group chat: "ok everybody, I have a fun movie to suggest." After the boring disappointments of The Devil All the Time and Project Power, after the unspeakable horrors I witnessed in The Last Days of American Crime, I confess I log in my Netflix account holding my breath. Enola Holmes brought a sigh of relief. Nothing life-changing, mind you, just a fun, entertaining movie that reimagines the canon of Sherlock Holmes, the classic of classics. Conan Doyle's detective is one of the few fictional characters who keeps getting adapted in fresh ways without ever wearing out his welcome.
Giving Mycroft and Sherlock a little sister is not entirely new...
We saw a lost sister popping up in the last, disappointing season of BBC's Sherlock. Enola Holmes didn't get the idea from Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat series, though. Enola Holmes is based upon a series of young adult novels written by Nancy Springer and published since 2006. These were books the young Millie Bobby Brown read with her sister when she was, well, younger. Stranger Things' star-player loved Enola's adventures and decided to produce a movie about them with her family. She had to wait a couple of years to be old enough to play the protagonist . When I was a kid, I loved the Animorphs series by K. A. Applegate. Can I picture myself back then thinking: "I have to call someone to produce a movie adaptation!"? I cannot but my father did not own a production company like Millie's.
She nails the character of Enola perfectly: a young feminist with her brother's famous gift for investigation but a hint of naivety due to her young age and inexperience of Victorian London dynamics. Henry Cavill co-stars as the least Sherlock-looking Sherlock Holmes of all the time. Sam Clafin is a pompous Mycroft. And Helena Bonham Carter plays Enola's unconventional mother, unconventional even by Holmes family standards. Eudoria Holmes disappears the day of her daughter's sixteen birthday, leaving behind only a small book full of encoded messages.
The movie, directed by Harry Bradbeer, has its flaws. I'm thinking of his fondness for female protagonists looking straight in the camera, chatting with the audience about every other event in the movie. Aren't there more subtle ways to remind us that he directed Fleabag? And sure, Henry Cavill's Sherlock Holmes is utterly ridiculous for anyone who has read a single line from Doyle's books, but this is a movie adapted from a YA novel, meant to be seen by family and young audience. I daresay, specifically, the American audience, judging from the stereotypical portrait of the Victorian Era given by the movie. Harry Bradbeer has an English passport, but it has not that magic English touch a la Guy Ritchie. (That was another Sherlock, though.)
Surprisingly, the movie is actually better than the novel, with some major changes in the investigation and the resolution of Enola's first case. Predictably, Sherlock Holmes has more space in the movie adaptation, and is more likable than his book counterpart. If you have The Witcher star playing in your movie, you want him to be on screen as much as possible.
What I find fascinating and a little concerning in movies like Enola Holmes is how they threat their own messages of empowerment. Jack Thorne's screenplay is not subtle at all in this sense. Enola literally tells you at the very beginning of the movie how modern, feminist, and open-minded she is, thanks to her peculiar upbringing. She can do martial arts, ride a bicycle fairly well (still learning), she has read "The Subjection of Women" by John Stuart Mill. She tells you all of this by looking directly in the eyes because of Fleabag syndrome. And yet Enola is not actively annoying, possibly because she is only 16. Nevertheless, I wouldn't judge anyone who considers this movie too loud in this regard.
You can sense a "but" coming, right? Spoiler: I need to nitpick about the corsets. There is a scene in which Enola dresses as an adult woman to disguise herself in London. She has to wear a corset, a piece of clothing she has never worn before. Ahhh, the good all corset misconception: from Gone with the Wind to Titanic, the corset is almost always portrayed as a torture device. Was it controversial even in the Victorian Era? Yes. Is it solely a dangerous accessory created by men to make women suffer? No. Actually, the corset was quite common among men, too. And yet Enola turns again towards the screen and informs us that yes, corsets are evil, but she has to wear one because it will give her strategic help in hiding her money. That's how far the "positive portraying" of female lead characters has gone. A young protagonist anticipates her modern audiences objections to something completely historically appropriate but now morally wrong (really?), to explain that she has an excuse for doing it.
Why does a character have to act according to 2020 sensitivities, no matter how ahistoric, to be considered a positive role model? Why are companies like Netflix so afraid of making the protagonist of their movies do something "controversial"? Enola cannot just be a good person. She also has to be actively fighting social oppression even if she's an adventurous teenager visiting London for the first time in her life.
Enola's mother is a perfect example of this common forced urgency. The character is already a rebellious woman in the source material. In Springer's novel, Enola's mother follows her desire to live outside society's oppressive rules, leaving her daughter behind without an explanation. In the movie, Eudoria Holmes's escape has to have a deeper political meaning. This need to transform every act into something morally righteous reveals modern storytellers complete inability to deal with the fact that even good positive characters can be multi-faceted and behave selfishly once in a while. B-