2020 thriller/mystery, dir. Harry Bradbeer, Millie Bobby Brown, Henry Cavill; IMDb /
allmovie.
On the morning of her sixteenth birthday, Enola Holmes finds that her
mother has disappeared without a word. But since she's the younger
sister of Mycroft and Sherlock, she doesn't wait to see what will
happen next. On the way to London, she runs into someone fleeing from
his own problems…
This is low-complexity entertainment, and as such it does its
job. There's an independent tone (Enola's true path is not to be an
imitation of her mother or of either of her brothers, but to do her
own thing); there's plenty of action; there are some competent actors
(and Burn Gorman who is at least in a part that plays to his
strengths). Of course, if you poke it with a stick it falls apart;
this is Historyland, not 1884. In reality, militancy for women's
suffrage wouldn't start for another twenty years; carriages weren't
driven on the right side of the road; corridors connecting
compartments on trains didn't come in until 1903; shotgun shells
weren't cased in bright red plastic… in order to enjoy the film, it's
necessary to forget many of the things one knows.
Which is a shame, because that makes it less relevant to the real
world. Meanwhile, the cast is appealing and their gyrations entertain.
Enola herself wavers between competent and blubbery as the moment
demands, but when she's being competent she's interesting. And
there's one other character who can't be classed immediately as just a
good helpful person or a bad obstructive person, which is frankly more
than I had expected in this kind of thing.
People who see lurking feminism and "political correctness" everywhere
will hate this film because it has a female protagonist who isn't a
doormat (so it's doing the right thing there), and it biases the world
so that she's always in the right. In an age when people are seriously
proposing ending female suffrage and not being immediately laughed out
of the room, it's probably necessary to be this firm on the message.
It's just a shame it couldn't have been a better film at the same
time.
(The Conan Doyle estate, which tries desperately to grub any money it
can from anything resembling the few bits of Sherlock Holmes that it
still holds in its rotting claws, has lodged a copyright claim because
the film shows Holmes with emotions… and those only occur in stories
published after 1923, and are therefore still in US copyright. So
that's a point in the film's favour; anything that annoys those
corpse-looters is worth doing.)
- Posted by Ashley R Pollard at
11:31am on
29 November 2020
We enjoyed the movie.
I'm going to roll out the usual answer, it's not a documentary. Shakespeare's play were AFAIK originally presented in Elizabethan clothes of the era, so there's a historical precedent for 'presentism' within stories.
I sometimes think you must be the mirror image equivalent of Galaxy Quests Thermian's. The historical documents...
...cue squealing laughter.
- Posted by RogerBW at
12:16pm on
29 November 2020
Oh, if you put the whole thing into modern times that would be a very different story, but one that could still work. (And I've enjoyed some modern-set Sherlock Holmes.) The core problem to my mind with using a historical period but getting the details wrong is that the more it deviates from reality it feels as though the setting has been made that way specifically to assist the author in making their point.
Which it has, of course, in pretty much every case; even an author writing strictly historical (or strictly in someone else's setting) can choose which bits they emphasise. But it shouldn't feel that way. If it does, it can turn a good point into a preachy parable.
- Posted by Chris Bell at
06:04pm on
29 November 2020
Not to mention anachronistic detail being simply boring because it irritates me clean out of the plot. Like someone wearing a wristwatch in a production of Julius Caesar being played in togas: there may be a clock striking in Act II of the play, but a wristwatch is absurd.
It's not just annoying when someone cba to check on the history of a place. If the distance from Oxford to Cambridge were specifically mentioned as being a hundred miles one might blink a bit, or even baulk at it. And if someone were to assert in a story that turquoise is a shade of red, and this were important to the plot as a fact rather than an indication that the person asserting it was slightly eccentric, it would make that story a little less worth paying attention to, I feel.
- Posted by Owen Smith at
06:29pm on
29 November 2020
Historic detail being out by a decade or two can be glossed over to extent. But bright red plastic anything is going to look thoroughly out of place. And driving on the right? Really? Can't these people do ANY research?
- Posted by RogerBW at
06:32pm on
29 November 2020
The director (Harry Bradbeer) is English. The director of photography (Giles Nuttgens) is English. I strongly suspect that this particular one isn't a case of "they didn't know", but rather "they chose to do it that way anyway" – perhaps for the visual grammar of the shot, perhaps because they thought it would confuse US audiences.
- Posted by Owen Smith at
11:51pm on
30 November 2020
But, with coaches you can actually demonstrate why we drive on the left in the UK! Or did they want a shot where they whip the driver coming the other way by accident?
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