What I’m watching: a new take on the Sherlock Holmes universe

Date: 10/7/2020

What I’m watching: a new take on the Sherlock Holmes universe.

On Netflix: ‘Enola Holmes’

The impact a literary character has on popular culture is proven by the number of times over the course of more than a century people can come back to it and adapt it for their purposes.

Sherlock Holmes is at the top of that list. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional consulting detective has been the source materials for novels, films, radio shows, plays, and television shows.

Just within the past 20 years, we’ve had two Holmes movies starring Robert Downey Jr., a depiction of Holmes in old age (“Mr. Holmes”), a revisionist TV series starring Benedict Cumberbatch, another TV modernization with Jonny Lee Miller and a comedy called “Holmes and Watson,” starring Will Ferrell and John. C. Reilly.

People keep wanting to put their own mark on the venerable character. Nancy Springer is one of those folks as she created the children’s book “Enola Holmes,” about a teenaged sister to the famous detective and their older brother, the inscrutable Mycroft Holmes.

Originally slated for theatrical release, but sold off to Netflix because of the pandemic, “Enola Holmes” is a handsome film with first class production values and an accomplished cast. It is a vehicle for the talented British actress Millie Bobby Brown who also carries a producer credit for the movie.

The premise is the two Holmes brothers left home when their sister was about six years old. Their mother and her live in a rambling country estate where mom (Helena Bonham Carter) raised the little girl in an unconventional manner. She teaches her everything you could imagine and is her near constant companion.

At age 16, Enola wakes up to finds her mother has left. It is then her two older brothers, who have not seen her in 10 years, return. Sherlock (Henry Cavill) is charged with finding her, while Mycroft (Sam Claflin) begins to assert his rights as the heir to the estate and the guardian of his sister.

Enola wants nothing of the drama her brothers bring and uses a gift from her mother to track her down, escaping from them and heading to London. In her quest she stumbles across a young man, Lord Tewkesbury, who is trying to follow his life’s ambition of working with plants and flowers instead of filling his late father’s seat in the House of Lords.

Soon enough, Enola is being hunted by her brothers and Lord Tewkesbury is dodging an assassin.

The plot gets fairly convoluted and the film has an unsatisfying ending that is obviously made for a sequel. Running over two hours, the film is not very well paced and drags in spots.

Brown carries the film and she shows, as she has done in other productions, that she is an accomplished performer who clearly has a long career ahead of her. I liked the character of Enola a great deal.

I’m a Holmes fan, but I’m not a purist. You really can’t be with the film and TV adaptations, as so often it is the will of the filmmakers to use the characters as simply a springboard for their own concepts.

That’s why I had to overlook in this film that Cavill simply doesn’t look anything as Holmes is supposed to look and that Mycroft is supposed to be overweight and lazy, as well as the only person in Great Britain who is smarter than Holmes.

This new adaptation may serve as an introduction to the classic characters to younger audiences, but others might find it draggy and over-written.