Enid (2009)

Intense, gripping, stylish and poignant

A bit overrated, but still an amazing film

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

After watching the "E. Nesbit" episode from "The Edwardians" I realised why her books ("The Railway Children", "The Enchanted Castle" etc) have become classics enjoyed by children and adults alike - it is because she truly loved children and could put herself into their world. Enid Blyton as portrayed by Helena Bonham Carter was a harpy - a person who could write formularized children's books that appealed to only the young but had no empathy with her own!!I watched this as a couple of friends had recommended it and was completely absorbed in the whole strange story of Enid Blyton's life - and Helena Bonham Carter can take full credit for this. I think the signs were there from the start, having a father who is the apple of your eye desert you, then trying unsuccessfully to escape from a mother, who from the couple of scenes she had, was not going to sugar coat life - here was a girl who wanted to escape reality.From the film she didn't seem to struggle for recognition with her writing, once she started she married her publisher who then began to drink heavily when he realised she was completely self absorbed and only thought of herself and her "little friends" - he and the kids could go to Hell!! One of her children, Imogen Pollock wrote a book about what having Enid Blyton for a mother was really like, called "A Childhood at Green Hedges" and I am sure the film must have borrowed heavily from this. The film opens with an explosive Enid answering a charge from the B.B.C. that her books are not her own but as the film unfolds it's clear that she has written every single word, she doesn't have time for anything else, she certainly wouldn't win "Mother of the Year"!! Enid is so full of love and gratitude to her fans, her "little friends", but as exasperated Hugh says "if they knew you they wouldn't like you" - she takes them on outings, invites them to parties where they can eat as much red jelly as they like but up at the top of the shadowy stairs it seems like the only children not having any treats are her own!! Worse is to come when Hugh goes to war, Enid takes up with Kenneth Walker (Denis Lawson) and he returns to find Enid about to divorce him. He shoulders all the blame for the privilege of seeing his daughters whenever he likes but with the divorce finalised, Enid reneges on her promise and also is the means of him never being able to work in publishing again!! Her new husband is just as happy to shield her from life's brutal facts. One scene where the father comes home on leave and the little girls are eager to show him their rabbits - ""There were two but Mummy and Uncle Ken ate one". Another is when Enid puts a little Noddy doll in pride of place on a table and moves her family photos to the very back and in the most telling (for me) Enid, as a new mother, just staring and staring at her little baby screaming, not having the least inclination to pick her up or soothe her, wanting desperately to get back to the books for her little friends.Life can't always be put on hold and when her brother Carey reappears in her life (she had told everybody that her family had died) to tell her that her mother had just died and why had she forsaken them, plus a few shocking truths about her beloved father, Enid suffers a complete breakdown which may have led to the dementia that killed her.Pretty gripping stuff if you only know Enid Blyton as the author of Noddy, The Magic Faraway Tree, The Secret Seven and the Famous Five!!!

Everybody has read at least one of Blyton's books ;it brings back good memories.In "Enid" ,Helena Bonham- Carter portrays a malicious cold calculating writer ,incredibly selfish.when her books are lessons in moral (although a bit obsolete nowadays) ,she's only interested in the others ' children,and only because they admire her ;her own daughters do not get any love or affection (that's what the younger daughter wrote ,the other had reportedly another opinion).She seems still in love with her father who nevertheless left the family when her siblings were young;Ken ,her second husband ,is an older ,mature man;she despises Hugh ,the first one,and she ruins his life .When WW2 breaks ,she acts as though she does not care ,still living in the Famous Five world ,on their private island ;but when business is at stake,she 's no longer a child,but a ruthless person,even a woman ahead of her time: that may be the key to the George /Georgina character to whom being a girl was a disgrace.Bonham-Carter's excellent as ever and her performance is terrifying.

When I was a child, I absolutely adored Enid Blyton's books; like Beatrix Potter's simple but charming, whimsical and beautifully illustrated stories, her books were full of characters I could relate to(ie. Silky from the Magic Faraway Tree stories), magical or exciting adventures and moments where I laughed and cried. At 17, I still have the utmost respect for her work, and while it was flawed, I liked this biographical drama.One definite plus was the way it was filmed, it was shot in a very sumptuous visual style that was most suitable. The costumes were ravishing, the scenery was breathtaking and the makeup was immaculate. The music score had parts that were a) haunting, b) poignant and c) hypnotic, the same effect that a minimalist score would have. I also liked the embedded references to her books, some as Enid sat at her typewriter, the script was well above average and the ending was somewhat moving.The acting is very well done. Both Matthew Macfadyen and Dennis Lawson turned in great work as Hugh and Kenneth, and to some extent I felt sorry for both their characters; Hugh because of the way Enid treated him and Kenneth because he was seemingly oblivious to what Enid was really like. Helena Bonham Carter looked beautiful and gave a wonderful performance. If I were to be honest though I prefer her more passionate and headstrong characters in A Room with a View and Howards End.It is here though where the flaws of this drama come. I think it was more to do with how she was written than how she was acted, but somehow I wasn't sure whether Enid was really that one-dimensional, here she is quite hypocritical and insensitive, then again it may be just me. Another problem if not so significant was that I felt some of the earlier scenes, particularly the scenes where Enid is a child, were a tad rushed.Overall, I generally liked this biographical drama, not perfect in my opinion but worth watching. 8/10 Bethany Cox

This is a remarkable achievement in television film-making for the BBC. Helena Bonham Carter delivers yet another stunningly brilliant performance, which quite takes one's breath away. She truly 'becomes' the children's' writer Enid Blyton to a degree which even has one worried, as can she really turn back into Helena Bonham Carter again, after all that? As an actress generally, she just gets better and better (see my previous reviews of her films of recent years), and soon she may explode and become a kind of super-nova perhaps, scattering the screen with particles of light and stray atoms, building blocks of a future galaxy. (In any case, she is a star, whether she explodes or not. And she can certainly be seen at a distance of several light-years, even in her present state, without causing undue alarm to all those extraterrestrial observers who must be peering at her through their telescopes.) The director, James Hawes, who comes of the unlikely pedigree of some Dr. Who episodes and does not have a heavy-weight drama CV, turns out to be a serious quality drama director of immense skill and sensitivity. So well done Hawes, and may you let 'er rip as often as possible in that vein, which is clearly your true metier, as we can all now see. Wonderful performances are delivered by Matthew Macfadyen as Blyton's first husband and Denis Lawson as her second. It cannot be stressed strongly enough how easy it would have been for this biopic to go disastrously wrong. Everything depended on subtlety and impeccable judgement, all of which the director, the two writers, and the actors uniformly delivered to absolute perfection. Even the children in the film were superb, lacking all the annoying qualities of so many children in films and television these days. This film really does deserve several awards. It is so much better, for instance, than the over-rated feature films about Iris Murdoch which came out a few years ago, as well as the over-hyped '84 Charing Cross Road' of many years before, and several other similar attempts at films about authors. This film is simply sensational in its high level of achievement. As for the subject matter, it could not be more horrifying, but accurate, a portrayal of a famous children's' writer. Enid Blyton was an absolute monster of a human being, a hypocrite of cosmic proportions, and totally vile and disgusting as a person. (How could either of her husbands stand her even for a day? The first one clearly could not, which is why he turned to drink and stood looking stupefied at her, as if he were staring at an anaconda, which in fact he was, albeit one with a woman's face.) It is difficult to think of anyone other than Helena Bonham Carter who could have pulled this off with such sensitivity and delicacy, as this was a highly specialised assignment, playing Enid Blyton, and not to be undertaken lightly, or by anyone hackneyed and overly 'actor-ish'. The whole film and all the performances exude a powerful honesty, authenticity, and balance which are so difficult to achieve with an ensemble of people ranging from director to writers to performers and cameraman. It just all works so well. But why, oh why, did this appear on the tiny minority channel of BBC-Four, as if the idiots and morons who run BBC were ashamed of something of such high quality? They of course prefer such loathsome persons as Russell Brand and the unspeakably disgusting (pardon me while I am sick) Jonathan Ross. A change of government in Britain cannot come quickly enough, so that the BBC can be brought to its senses, its executives who lack any semblance of ability or competence can stop being paid more than hedge fund managers for doing nothing of any worth, and some kind of appreciation of public service broadcasting can be brought back again whereby magnificent films like this one will be given their due prominence on a main channel at peak time viewing. It gives one hope that there is still anyone out there capable of making a decent television film in Britain at the present time, other than Stephen Poliakoff of course, when the Philistines are so rampant and are in control of every inch of the high ground, and with culture on the run, harried by unrestrained and in-your-face mediocrity, idiocy, lack of taste, and vacuity, which are the hallmarks of the BBC in this year 2009. Hawes, Bonham Carter, and co. have taken a stand. We should drown them in little statues to go on their mantelpieces, to testify to how we appreciate what they have done. If only!