Enola Holmes: The game's afoot!

Enola Holmes (2020) • View trailer

Four stars. Rated PG-13, and ludicrously, for occasional peril

By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.2.20

I love when it’s obvious, mere minutes into a film, that we’re in for a lot of fun.

 

When her mother vanishes under mysterious circumstances, Enola Holmes (Millie Bobby
Brown) is forced to request help from her older brothers, Sherlock (Henry Cavill, left)
and Mycroft (Sam Claflin) ... who prove to have unacceptable plans for her future.

Enola Holmes — debuting on Netflix — is an absolutely delightful adaptation of The Case of the Missing Marquess, the first book in Nancy Springer’s young adult series about the hitherto unrevealed teenage younger sister of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes. The setting is London, the year 1884: just as Sherlock is in the process of establishing his credentials, following the successful resolution of “A Study in Scarlet” and “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.”

 

The literary Enola is plucky, intelligent and resourceful; as depicted here by Millie Bobby Brown — who shot to fame via TV’s Stranger Things — she’s also mischievous, endearing and quite captivating. Director Harry Bradbeer and scripter Jack Thorne don’t merely break the fourth wall; they shatter it completely, with Enola frequently pausing to address us viewers directly, or to shoot us a knowing glance.

 

That’s a tricky gimmick to employ, as it risks trivializing the story, and/or becoming too “cute.” But Bradbeer and Brown pull it off with élan, thanks in great part to the young actress’ facility with a well-timed line of dialogue. She essentially draws us into Enola’s unfolding adventure, as if we’re well-trusted confidants.

 

Bradbeer also spices this live-action adventure with occasional Victorian-style “stick figure” graphics, courtesy of animators Luca De Giglio and Lucas Scapim; they’re employed much the way Terry Gilliam’s similarly retro animation bridged the comic sketches in a Monty Python TV episode. They serve here as brief history lessons, character introductions, or depictions of Enola’s deductive reasoning.

 

She’s clever and physically adept, having been schooled in both book knowledge and jiu-jitsu self-defense skills, courtesy of her free-thinking and rather eccentric mother, Eudoria (Helena Bonham Carter). Although forced to endure the late 19th century laws and social traditions that place so many restrictions on women, Eudoria is a steadfast supporter of the suffrage cause, and wants to help create a world where her daughter can have freedom and power.

 

Carter is absolutely perfect for the role. She radiates authority, determination and calm resolve, along with a knowing gaze that bespeaks an impressive intellect. (This is, after all, the woman who raised the world’s most famous consulting detective; we have to assume that he got some of that acumen from his mother!)

 

The Lady in the Van: Driven to delightful distraction

The Lady in the Van (2015) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, and too harshly, for a fleeting unsettling image
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 2.19.16

Some plays make awkward films, the very nature of their enclosed stage universe rendered claustrophobic on the big screen.

When Alan (Alex Jennings) cautiously worries about his new "permanent interloper's"
ability to drive — let alone whether she even possesses a license — the feisty Miss
Shepherd (Maggie Smith) shrugs him off with one of her imperious displays of
dignified entitlement.

That absolutely isn’t the case with The Lady in the Van, which opens up quite cleverly under the guidance of director Nicholas Hytner and scripter Alan Bennett. The latter has adapted this charming little drama from his own play, which debuted in 1999 in London’s West End, and which in turn was based on actual events recorded in his exhaustive memoirs.

Maggie Smith starred in the stage production, and also played the same role in a BBC Radio adaptation. No surprise, then, that she delivers a crisp, saucy and richly memorable performance in this cinematic version.

She plays Mary Shepherd, an elderly homeless woman who lives in a dilapidated van that she has trundled about a bucolic North London street called Gloucester Crescent, a neighborhood which — in this late 1960s setting — hosts various British stage and literary luminaries. As introduced in Hytner’s film, we get the vague sense that “Miss Shepherd” has made a habit of parking in front of a given house until her sloppy ways prove too distressing, at which point she fires up the van and moves elsewhere along the lane.

Her eccentric behavior comes to the attention of playwright, screenwriter, actor and author Alan Bennett (Alex Jennings) when he moves into the neighborhood, taking the house at No. 23. She’s rather hard to miss — given the combination of street rubbish and feisty imprecations that trail in her wake — and Bennett’s new neighbors are only too happy to supply details and rumors.

They’ve all kinda/sorta tolerated Miss Shepherd, out of a sense of liberal guilt that prompts them into occasional deliveries of food, reading material and any other small items they assume she might find useful. Parents cluck when their children, passing too close to Miss Shepherd, wrinkle their noses and complain that “she smells bad.”

Here, too, Bennett’s descriptive prose paints marvelous word pictures, when (for example) his running commentary describes her aromatic miasma as an “odoriferous concerto ... with urine only a minor component.”

Mr. Holmes: Far from elementary

Mr. Holmes (2015) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG, for disturbing images and dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang

Some stage actors spend their entire careers hoping to play Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman. When it comes to great literary characters, however, the ne plus ultra appears to be Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes (Ian McKellen, left) is delighted when his housekeeper's young son,
Roger (Milo Parker), expresses interest in the great detective's beloved hives of honeybees.
The boy, in turn, senses that sharing this hobby will help his much older friend forget, if
only for brief times, the unpleasant frustrations of advancing age.

How else to explain the scores of individuals who’ve taken a crack at the world’s most famous consulting detective? When Guinness World Records honored Holmes as the most portrayed literary human character in film and TV, three years ago, he had been depicted 254 times by more than 75 actors.

That list now includes the venerable Ian McKellen, starring in director Bill Condon’s adaptation of Mitch Cullin’s 2005 Holmes pastiche, A Slight Trick of the Mind.

Arthur Conan Doyle purists may be dismayed by this handling of their beloved detective, for this is not the hard-charging rationalist depicted with authoritative panache by Basil Rathbone, Jeremy Brett, Benedict Cumberbatch and many others. McKellen instead gives us a frail, almost feeble Holmes, long removed from his illustrious career, vulnerable to the ravages of time, advanced age and self-doubt.

Condon’s film has an atmosphere of despondent finality about it: a tone similar to that employed by Richard Lester in 1976’s equally melancholy Robin and Marian, wherein Sean Connery’s exhausted and aging Robin Hood is poised at the similar precipice of mortality.

But even if this Holmes is a shadow of his former vigorous self, McKellen’s twinkling eyes and insightful gaze (at the detective’s better moments) remind us that the zealous pursuer of clues may be deeply buried within this dilapidated frame ... but he’s still there.

The time is 1947, and the 93-year-old Holmes is long retired, having moved to a quiet farmland home along the Sussex coast, in order to tend to his bees (as per Doyle’s projection of where the detective would wind up, late in life). Meals and other modest needs are handled by a live-in housekeeper, Mrs. Munro (Laura Linney), and her young son, Roger (Milo Parker).

Her husband, the boy’s father, was killed in the war.

Scripter Jeffrey Hatcher retains the structure of Cullin’s book, which cross-cuts between three narratives. The first and most extensive, set in the “present” of 1947, finds the increasingly lonely Holmes bonding with young Roger, who in turn admires the great detective as a father figure. Roger’s mother, all too aware of Holmes’ age, worries that this might not be advisable for a boy who already has lost his real father.