Butler's Cinema Scene

Milie  Bobby Brown, Helena Bonham Carter

“ENOLA HOLMES” My rating: B

123 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Netflix’s “Enola Holmes” would be a welcome diversion at any time.

That it also confirms young Millie Bobby Brown (you know…the bald one from “Stranger Things”) as a major star is but frosting on the scone.

The premise of Harry Bradbeer’s film (Jack Thorne adopted from Nancy Springer’s YA novel) is that the great detective Sherlock Holmes had, in addition to his brother Mycroft, a little sister named Enola.

Raised by her mother Eudoria (Helena Bonham Carter) to be an independent, inquisitive, self-asserting young woman (instead of crocheting and piano 16-year-old Enola was trained in archery and karate), this youngest Holmes is shattered when one morning her dear Mama vanishes.

Big brother Mycroft (Sam Claflin), a pompous and unyieldingly chauvinistic government bigwig, is Enola’s legal guardian — though he hasn’t seen her for a decade. Now Mycroft arranges for her to be shipped off to the smothering finishing school run by the fascistic Miss Harrison (a gloriously scenery-chewing Fiona Shaw).

In the meantime, sibling Sherlock (Henry Cavill) will try to sleuth out what happened to their mother.

But Enola has a head start.  Cannily picking up on clues Eudoria deliberately left behind, Enola disguises herself as a boy and hits the road. Along the way she befriends a runaway adolescent nobleman, Tewkesbury (Louis Partridge), who is being stalked by a bowler-hatted assassin (Burn Gorman).  Upshot: Violent confrontations and a teen crush.

She also discovers that her mother and her fellow suffragettes may have been involved in a bomb-making plot. And she runs afoul of Scotland Yard’s Inspector Lestrade (Adeel Akhtar), hot on the trail both of Enola and Tewkesbury.

Henry Cavill, Sam Claflin, Millie Bobby Brown

White it is continually referencing  Conan-Doyle’s fictional world, “Enola Holmes” breaks with tradition in a couple of key respects.  For starters, the film takes a tongue-in-cheek approach.  Enola often speaks directly to the audience; on more than one occasion she reacts to an outburst of male idiocy by delivering an exasperated look directly into the camera. It’s absolutely charming.

And the film’s subtext is strongly feminist/egalitarian. The film is less intent on solving the central mystery of the missing Eudoria (in fact, there are gaping holes never addressed) than in scoring points for the rights of women and working stiffs.

In this scenario the preoccupied Sherlock and reactionary Mycroft (minor characters) represent a threatened elitist class battling social progress. The plot to murder young Tewkesbury has something to do with the vote he will cast in Parliament on a liberal reform bill.

Brown makes for a captivating heroine (good Lord, she looks stunning in those late-Victorian fashions) and her watchability factor is off the charts.

Director Bradbeer generally does a first-class job of balancing all these elements within an impeccably rendered environment. My main criticism is that at two hours “Enola Holmes” is too much of a good thing.  There’s a central passage centering on Enola’s travails in the finishing school that seems there mostly to make political points; it bogs down the narrative.

But overall this new look at the Holmes clan is captivating.

| Robert W. Butler