“Enola” is an anagram of the word “alone”—that’s one of the first things you’ll learn from the eponymous, sixteen-year-old heroine in the droll new Netflix movie Enola Holmes, set in 1884 and based on the YA novel series by Nancy Springer. In the film, which is written by Jack Thorne and deftly directed by Harry Bradbeer (of Fleabag and Killing Eve fame), Enola (Millie Bobby Brown) tells the viewer directly that because of this, she’s always thought of herself just as much as “alone” as “Enola,” but we also learn other things about her from this moment: that she loves words, and anagrams, and that she does not mind being on her own. Still, this latter detail is an interesting proposition for a film whose central motivation is the pursuit of another person. Enola’s beloved, iconoclastic, wacky mother (Helena Bonham Carter—who else?) has suddenly vanished from the rural estate home where they have spent the last sixteen years being virtually inseparable. Enola knows that her mother has left, rather than been taken—and because of their indelible bond, would not have done so without very good reason. Fortunately, Enola believes she’ll have some help—from her two, much older brothers whom she has not seen since she was small. One is a high-up government employee, and the other is a famous private detective. If the oldest won’t be able to help, she is sure the second one can. Because he is Sherlock Holmes, who can solve any case, and find anybody.
However, once the Holmes brothers—the stuffy Mycroft (Sam Claflin, garrulous and rodentlike) and Sherlock (Henry Cavill, again a man of steel, but in mien instead of might)—do arrive, they cause more problems than they promise to fix. Mycroft is annoyed that their nutty mother has allowed her daughter to gallivant all over the countryside, and play tennis in the drawing room, and speak her mind and all of that flaff. He wants to send her to a finishing school run by the stern Miss Harrison (Fiona Shaw) so that she can learn manners and find a husband. Sherlock (played as ‘the strong and silent type’ for maybe the first time ever) mostly stares out of windows and reads the newspaper. He’s going to find their runaway mother, while Mycroft wrangles their sister. But the vivacious and unflappable Enola gets the better of them both, disguising as a boy and absconding for London, following a set of clues that her mother has left behind. They are very easy clues (lots of letter-rearranging, Enola’s strong suit), so it’s a real wonder why Sherlock has not cracked them first, since he’s apparently so smart. But he also doesn’t seem to be in any great rush.
The film is, ultimately, a tale about voting rights and voter suppression—championing a government which seeks to support all its citizens rather than the gentry.Enola finds a companion for her trip, after she helps out a teenager similarly on the lam—the Viscount Tewkesbury, Marquess of Basilwether (Louis Partridge). He’s her age, and he’d rather wander through woods than settle into his recently-acquired title and head to the House of Lords to vote on upcoming legislation. He’s got a family searching for him, as well as a creepy assassin in a brown bowler hat (Burn Gorman, great for this sort of role). So Enola takes him with her, investigating his mystery as she goes (together, they form a wholesome but flirty mini-collaborative; he forages for mushrooms for them to eat, while she gives him a homemade haircut, details which those viewers of us still in quarantine might find especially sweet). Scenes where they stroll through the English countryside are the film’s most lovely—the film is full of beautiful aerial shots of verdant hills and thick forests. It’s far from Baker Street, but this isn’t an issue. Few shots in the film resemble what you’d expect of a Sherlock Holmes-adjacent story (there’s one, of a carriage pulling away on a rain-slicked street in London), but it’s one of the lovelier and more effective ways Enola Holmes refocuses its story on its new heroine, its new mission.
[SPOILER] Our girl is determined not to get bogged down by the presence of men (as her mother taught her), but actually, some additional dwelling on men would have served the film well; one of Enola Holmes‘s most serious pitfalls is that it buries (for far too long) the stakes of the parliamentary legislation that Tewkesbury is avoiding, which may have something to do with the attempts on his life. The film’s backdrop is the imminent 1884 Reform Bill, and some exposition about it would make the plot a lot clearer and better organize Enola Holmes‘s thematic concerns. The 1884 Reform Bill (also known as the “Representation of the People Act”) was an enormous and highly controversial document that proposed to extend suffrage to rural workers—for the first time, non-landowning men were eligible to vote, which would swell the electorate to include 60% of the men in nation. (It passed.)
This backstory is crucial to the message of Enola Holmes. It is, ultimately, a tale about voting rights and voter suppression—championing a government which seeks to support all its citizens rather than the gentry. It’s about how everyone has an obligation to participate in government, and how those refused this right are duly obligated to fight for it, to better themselves and future generations. It’s about how those born into privilege (like the white, wealthy, landowning Tewkesbury) have to use their power to redistribute it towards the people. In this spirit, Enola Holmes makes for a worthwhile ride. It has a very Gen-Z vibe outfitting its 19th century setting. Which is great on many levels, not the least of which is because the Victorian era is commonly misrepresented in popular entertainment as either an era of primness and repression or as a hunting ground for serial killers. Enola Holmes doesn’t avoid the first cliché as much as it does the second, but it does integrate themes of activism, diversity, and difference which were as relevant to the climate of Victorian London as they are today, and which are rarely seen in movies of this ilk.
Enola Holmes is also one of those handy modern productions that does not forget that race was an enormous aspect of Victorian society. Rather like Armando Iannucci’s new film The Personal History of David Copperfield or the recent British miniseries Year of the Rabbit, Enola Holmes is committed to historical accuracy in representing 19th century British society as a diverse world—and therefore does useful work in changing pop culture’s blanket, whitewashed assumptions about what that time and place must have looked like. In real life, Victorian London was extraordinarily multi-ethnic and multi-cultural, and Enola Holmes‘s representation of a racially integrated society helps to excavate this truth from the hegemonic whiteness of, say, Miramax period flicks. Though, it would have served the film well to spend a little more time illustrating how race factored into the national suffrage question: men were not barred from voting based on race, only on property ownership—which is distinct from but not unrelated to a specifically racial barrier. This film champions distributing power among the people; it would be helpful to know who has power, up to this point, and why. Still, if Enola Holmes does play around with its historical context and its postmodern precedents, it does this to offer a reinvention of pop-culture’s approaches to the period that is ultimately quite democratic.
The film, which debuted at Number 2 on Netflix last week, plays around with its source text, as well, and it ultimately does this to attempt to be progressive on a feminist scale, but this effort yields less successful results than its investment in representing race. This film’s Sherlock, (barely) brought to life by Cavill, is not the Sherlock you might recognize. He’s a a large glacier of a character in a double-breasted suit; enormous, quiet, slow-moving, and rather cold. He likes her, but he doesn’t really help her. She wants to be his assistant, but that’s not going to work. Why? “Sherlock Holmes works alone,” as someone in the film points out. Which I think is news to everybody? Because… what?
Indeed, one of the film’s more baffling attempts at feminist reclamation is tied to a jarring bit of literary erasure. In Enola Holmes, Sherlock does work alone. There is no Watson to be found, no trace of Watson, not a scrap of Watson. This seems to be part of an attempt to centralize Enola, to build her in the mold of her famous brother but make her better, faster, stronger—but also make her compassionate and humane (qualities which additionally ground her brother and make him care more about other people). Thus, she must do the same work that both Sherlock and Watson do. And this doesn’t do the film any favors… stripping its famous detective of his jovial, game sidekick winds up hollowing him out; without Watson, there are no disguises, no games, no tricks, no twists, no surprises, no fun, and also, because he writes the stories, no unifying threads. Enola inherits the interest in these things, as well as the burden of doing them all. And without his friend, Sherlock isn’t that interesting. He’s a giant letdown, which may well be the point, since before Enola meets her brother for the first time, having clipped articles about all his exploits, she regards him as a kind of Superman (if I’m reading meaning into the particular casting of Cavill) and then discovers he’s just a man. But making Holmes dull doesn’t make Enola stand out more. It just makes everything around her duller. It makes her the one kid in the group project who does all the work.
To her credit, Millie Bobby Brown is an ebullient and transfixing force, but as a relentless supply of energy, she is the film’s only sustainable power source. Considering all its charms, I did feel a little sad that Enola Holmes felt it had to erase so much of what is beloved about the original landscape, in order to build a great heroine faced with a meaningful uphill climb. But it peeved me in its seeming-insistence that Enola’s journey would be more worthwhile (cough, more feminist—that word gets thrown around a lot) if she has no outside help.
Exasperatingly, in Enola Holmes, fictional characters are given greater responsibility for real-life feminism than the real people who actually built it.It’s this insistence that Enola has to carry feminism on her shoulders that ultimately makes the film grow frustrating. Deleting Watson and dampening Sherlock are not ultimately problems in the scheme of things; what is a problem is that the film deletes the accomplishments of all other women from this era. Like so many Victorian-set modern stories, Enola Holmes seems to believe that its central female characters—Enola, her mother Eudoria, and Eudoria’s mysterious club of badass women, including a Black jujitsu master named Edith (Susan Wokoma)—are the only pro-women women left in the country since the death of trailblazing writer Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797. Exasperatingly, in Enola Holmes, fictional characters are given greater responsibility for real-life feminism than the real people who actually built it.
Watching this, I felt the same annoyance I felt with Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman, which takes place partially in London during World War I yet nearly-completely ignores that there were suffragettes marching through the streets at that time, leaving Diana Prince to show all the women of England how to be tough, stand up, and fight. In Enola Holmes, Fiona Shaw’s stern schoolmistress Miss Harrison is the straw-man stand-in for the typical Victorian woman, championing submissive, silent, and domestic behavior (and corseted waists, Hollywood’s favorite indicator of female oppression) as ideal female characteristics. Mycroft agrees with her. But treating this attitude as the standard Victorian opinion for how women should act ignores the thousands of real women who didn’t share these views, or who debunked them. It ignores that the culture was complicated on the issue of women’s roles, and pretends that the history of women’s progress is a long, straightforward battle waged by all of society against a small coterie of outliers from the feminist underground.
A weird detail in Enola Holmes that bothered me to this end concerns Enola’s reading habits. She’s read every book in her enormous library, at her mother’s mandate, and she singles out Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women as being essential. It’s the only female-authored book she mentions and she treats it a bit like the Bible, which… sure, great. But the film ultimately ignores that in the nearly hundred years since the publication of that treatise (it was written in 1792), there have been scores of trailblazing women who have, through writing as well as activism and other contributions, expanded conceptions of female potential or genius, and made space for women’s labor, achievements, and experiences. George Eliot would have been a far more relevant idol for the clever (and often male-disguised!) Enola to revere. The film might also want to know about Sarah Parker Remond, a Black anti-slavery and pro-woman academic who was one of the signers of Britain’s first petition (in 1866) calling for female suffrage. Or one of the many other brave women (including women of color) who made great strides for women’s and other equal rights.
Enola Holmes means well—that is undeniable. Still, it’s frustrating when films erase actual historical-female accomplishments to up the stakes of the proto-feminism of its own characters. That being said, as much as the movie insists that most Victorian women lived (or liked) subjugated lives, Enola Holmes does well to push back against one pervasive assumption pop culture seems to have about stories from the Victorian era, which is that there weren’t action heroines in that zeitgeist— that Victorian action heroines are a postmodern construction.
There were! Just read The Adventures of Judith Lee, a series of short stories by the popular writer Richard Marsh that appeared in The Strand from 1911 to 1916. Judith Lee is a lady detective (a term Enola Holmes gleefully adopts for herself) who is proficient in lip-reading and jujitsu, and has to deal with all sorts of high-octane thrills and hold her own in many fight sequences (including, in one installment, a fun sword fight in an Italian restaurant). The Adventures of Lois Cayley, published in 1899 by Arthur Conan Doyle’s own friend Grant Allen, tells of a similarly plucky, indefatigable lady detective who becomes a bicycle saleswoman as a ploy to see the world, before she winds up solving a cross-continental conspiracy theory. To its credit, Enola Holmes is full of stuff just like these stories: jujitsu, and bicycle riding, and explosions and girls fighting grown men who refuse to pull their punches. For all the film seems to stress that most Victorian women weren’t tough or encouraged to be tough, it also winds up capturing the enterprising spirit of many real-life Victorian stories for girls. I suppose YA stories have always had the same vibe. We’re reminded that society looks down on young women from the initial impressions of them logged by characters such as the pesky Inspector Lestrade (Adeel Akhtar).
Rather like the letters its heroine rearranges constantly, to make new words, Enola Holmes accomplishes all that it does by rejiggering all of its sources—historical, generally fictional, specifically Sherlockian. While many of the new orientations it offers are helpful, clearly illuminating aspects of history long concealed by less valiant efforts, it also needs to be careful about how much of history it actually rewrites, and how much progress it redistributes to its main character. For all that I enjoyed it, and for all that I am always in the mood to watch a film that gives power and notoriety to Sherlock Holmes’s hitherto-unknown younger sister, I wish it didn’t feel it had do this by making her constantly have to stand, and stand for everything, alone.
