I found I sort of missed hate-watching when I'd made it through the Netflix series Cursed, so when I saw the trailer for Enola Holmes (also on Netflix) and cringed throughout, it seemed like a good candidate for a hate-watching session. Only, I've learned that it's far more comfortable to hate-watch a series one bite-sized chunk at a time rather than a 2+-hour film. There were moments when I nearly gave up on Enola Holmes, even though I watched it at a time when I had little energy to do anything else.
It was awful. The jokes were unfunny, the supposedly moving moments didn't land and the characters were as thin as tracing paper. The film is supposed to be about the little sister of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes and set in late-Victorian times but has clearly no idea of either Sherlock Holmes lore or Victorian England. Now the actors, I grant you, were good, but a stellar cast was completely wasted on their barely-there or caricatured characters. And the "yay, women!" messaging was really clunky.
I've been reluctant to bring up Enola Holmes as I'm afraid of being unnecessarily hard on what is meant to be unpretentious entertainment. In spite of its puzzling 12+ Netflix rating, this is clearly a kids' film, best enjoyed by those who are 12- years old. It's been adapted from a book series of Young Adult mysteries, so isn't it unreasonable to expect that it should show any historical or Holmes-related insight?
There were so many things about this supposedly light confection that got my goat, though. There's the taking advantage of the Sherlock Holmes brand, when the script-writer (and possibly the author of the original books?) don't seem to know the first thing about the detective in question and his associates. Sherlock's and Enola's older brother Mycroft not only has the ungrateful task of representing the Old Horrid Order which represses women and poor people, it is expressly stated that he doesn't have his younger siblings' aptitude for deductions and detective work. Conan Doyle's Mycroft, on the other hand, was described as even more brilliant than his younger brother, and easily scores points off him when it comes to deductions. He's not into detecting simply because he can't be bothered. As for the Enola version of Sherlock himself, he has more in common with Mr Darcy than with the famous detective (including his looks): he's a bit socially awkward and doesn't know how to express his feelings, but his heart is in the right place. There's no Dr Watson, no Mrs Hudson, no Baker Street. Lestrade shows up briefly, played by Adeel Akhtar, an actor I have a lot of time for after he nailed Thénardier so brilliantly in the BBC’s Les Misérables. But he gets nothing to work with here, and is obliged to utter lines like: "Sherlock Holmes always works alone." Lies, I say!
The film wouldn't have lost anything if it had dropped the Holmes references altogether and contented itself with being a caper about a plucky girl with an unconventional upbringing and a bent for detecting who wants to find her mother (vanished without a trace, but voluntarily) and is caught up in high intrigue along the way. For my part, I could have borne it better, though I still wouldn't have liked it.
Another thing that really annoyed me about the film was the combination of its wanting to show how female-empowering it was at the expense of Those Horrible Victorians while not having done any homework about Victorian times. Now, films for children and teenagers in historical settings don't tend to be over-researched. And that's fine, mostly, that's the genre. But what with Enola Holmes making such a big deal out of how repressed women and the deserving poor are, you'd expect them to get the nature of said repression more or less right. In the film, Enola is for a time consigned to a finishing school with shades of Lowood. But elegant ladies attending a finishing school would never be subjected to simple attire and terrible food à la Lowood. Think it through.
The political circumstances of the plot are kept deliberately vague, which is just as well. But with nothing substantial to say about social conditions in Victorian England, the hand-wringing about "powerlessness" - poor Sherlock gets treated to a whole lecture on the subject from a friend of his mother's who teaches women martial arts in secret - merely comes across as irritating posturing.
Admittedly, one scene that threw me is passably historically correct. At one point, Enola comes across one of her mother's hideouts, and discovers gunpowder and bombs. "Mycroft was right", she muses, "mother is dangerous". Enola's mother is working for women's suffrage, and as I only found out fairly recently, there was a part of the suffragette movement which endorsed using violent means, though they stopped short of actually killing people. I was shocked when I discovered this, as it seemed not only wrong but counterproductive - were I a male MP, a bunch of angry women attacking my home wouldn't make me a convert to the cause of women's suffrage. Mrs Holmes is clearly one of these hard-liners, but the bombs are never touched on again, and it's not even made clear that they're not meant to be used on people. It would have been natural to bring the subject up when Enola and her mother finally meet again, or else why include the initial scene in the first place? Are we supposed to embrace the bomb-making, or what?
In its efforts to big up the resourcefulness of the heroine, the film also treats us to the tiresome trope of the Useless Male Love Interest. The young lord Enola comes across on her adventures may not be quite such an idiot as he appears in the trailer, but he is still the weak part of the pairing, what with Enola being much more intelligent, inventive, good at defending herself etc. As a woman, I feel patronised by this kind of plot-constructing. I enjoy strong women protagonists (not that they have to have kick-ass abilities, incidentally), but that doesn't mean I want to see male characters depicted as weak and pathetic. It reminds me of old Donald Duck adventures from my childhood, where Hughie, Dewey and Louie were always the responsible ones while Donald and Scrooge behaved like children. It was meant to pander to kids, I'm sure, but we saw through it - and thought Hughie, Dewey and Louie were being smug pains in the neck. (Luckily, the adventures improved with time.) A female protagonist doesn't need a useless male by her side to make her look good. Just make her interesting as a person.
It has to be said, though, that Frances de la Tour manages to rise above the material she's given as an aristocratic Dowager. Also, I did find it interesting that Fiona Shaw's finishing-school headmistress has the hots for her old school friend's son (Mycroft), which is fairly transgressive for a woman in her position. Mind you, that's played for laughs - not very sisterly, I would have thought.
