Millie Bobby Brown and Harry Styles are in two new streaming films that dropped over the weekend. One is decidedly more fun, but both do make the case for how these two will command rapt audiences in the years to come.
Enola Holmes 2 (Netflix UK/USA) - If anything, with no introduction of the character Enola necessary, this second installment is actually an improvement on the first. We get right into the action; Enola (Millie Bobby Brown) being pursued by two bobbies, and delightfully breaking stride to break the proverbial fourth wall and address us, the audience. While I know this breaking of the wall has been done to death and overused of late, I will have to concede that with Enola, it’s a most effective device, that Millie handlers with a charm all her own. The exposition then draws on actual historical events of the era, and it isn’t long before the case that Enola is working on, impinges and intersects with the case that her more established brother, Sherlock (Henry Cavill) is himself trying to solve.
Returning characters include the delightful Helena Bonham Carter as their mother, Eudoria Holmes, and Louis Partridge as Viscount Tewkesbury - the one who Enola semi-stallks in a completely humorous manner. I mentioned actual historical events, and this time, the case has to do with match factories and the dismal labor practices of the period. It’s Gen-Z attitude, values and personas inserted into a Victorian period drama - something which by all accounts shoudn’t even work, but does so on the strength of Millie’s attack on the Enola character. David Thewlis as a Scotland Yard Commissioner is a scene-stealing worthy addition, never hiding his contempt for the notion of a woman detective. It’s good to note that Millie is herself a producer of this franchise and there are still a number of books ready for adaptation.
My Policeman (Amazon Prime) - In a regular world, this somewhat muted, indie-like film about forbidden gay romance in the 1950’s would have quietly found its own audience, and enjoyed rather limited, minor success. But the fact that this film that flits between two time frames, the 1950’s and the 1990’s, stars one Harry Styles has turned the little film into one that enjoys curiosity way beyond its intent and scope. Of course, in the 1950’s sequences, it’s all about how gay love was forbidden and always done in subterfuge. Patrick (David Dawson) is a museum/art expert, while Tom (Harry Styles) is a young Brighton policeman who’s asked to pose for one of Patrick’s paintings. Then there’s Marion (Emma Corrin), a friend of Tom’s sister, who eventually marries Tom.
In the later time frame, we see Patrick ( Rupert Everett), a sick, convalescing senior, moving into the seaside house of Marion (Gina McKee) and Tom (Linus Roache). The mystery revolves around why Tom now wants nothing to do with Patrick, and the stoic role Marion plays in the tense domestic situation. As we move back and forth in time, the film makes much of how repressed society then was and how practicing homosexuals basically wore targets on their backs. To be fair, Styles acquits himself as an actor much better here than in Don’t Worry Darling. What problems I have with the exposition is how so much is underplayed and done in a very matter of fact manner, when some acting fireworks could have actually helped these characters resonate more strongly.