Enid

Enid Blyton is one of the best known children's authors to come from the UK, writing around 800 books during her career and created notable characters like Noddy and the Famous Five. When BBC Four made a season called Women we Loved they went for a warts and all telling of her live.

Enid starts of with Enid Blyton (Alexandra Brain/Lisa Diveney/Helena Bonham Carter) in the middle of a broken home. She would tell stories to her brothers to reassure them when their parent argued. Her father leaves the family Enid blames her mother and when old enough leaves to London to be come a writer. After some initial rejection Enid meets the publisher Hugh Pollock (Matthew MacFayden) and the two quickly fall in love and marry. With Enid becoming successful their become wealthy, start to have a family. Yet their marriage soars and whilst Enid was very good with young fans was a terrible mother to her own children. With the looming Hugh's stress increases and Enid finds comfort with another man, Kenneth Walters (Dennis Lawson).

Helena Bonham Carter is one of my favourite actresses and basically I would watch her in anything: even if a film is bad she is still very good in it. Her performance in Enid was very grounded and shows a very complex character, a woman who was brilliant children who were not own and had millions of fans, but awful with her own, often letting the nanny take care of them. Enid was made out to be a woman who would escape into fantasy and pretend nothing bad was happening, lying to save face. A woman who was too focused on her reading and had daddy issues for all her life. Bonham Carter was great at portraying this complex and rather vile character. But it was not just the Helena Bonham Carter show, Matthew MacFayden and Ramona Marquez were also great in Enid. Matthew MacFayden is an excellent actor and my favoured choice to follow Daniel Craig as 007. Here he has to play the archetypal 1930s man, some who had to bury his emotions and used alcohol to suppress them. But MacFayden was not just an emotional constipated, he does show a character who loves his children and who did love Enid once. Ramona Marquez is a great young child actress, best know for her role in Outnumbered. She still plays a naïve character, but this time much more scared and confused. She worked really well with the adult actors in the film.

James Hawes is best known as a television director and with Enid he didn't have much he could do. He did try and bring in some flair with flashbacks and the occasional fantasy sequence, but for the most part he was making a period pieces. But he still does a fine job, working with limited settings and with a limited budget was able to make Enid very authentic. He also got excellent performances from his actors and shows he has some talent.

Overall, worth watching, particularly if you are a Helena Bonham Carter fan.

I have never seen a biopic with so little sympathy for its subject. Even Hitler usually gets better treatment. Although Helena Bonham Carter delivers yet another great performance, Enid Blyton remains a very one dimensional character not to say that she is portrayed as cold and downright evil. Blyton's writing (more than 750 books) is shown as compulsive escapism from her own adulthood to an idealized childhood because her own childhood ended for her when her father left the family. Blyton seems to love children as a concept but has no emotional bond with her own daughters. As to why she treats her first husband so badly never becomes really clear, apparently it has to do with the fact that to some extent he was a father figure for her who ultimately had to disappoint her as a self fulfilling prophecy. That leaves the question open as to why her second marriage seems to work. There are occasions in that film where the viewer is just appalled by the evil of Blyton's interaction with people she loves but no one can really be evil and cold all the time. So this portray unfortunately misses the richness of any person's character and is more or less the trial of Enid Blyton. We have to bear in mind that this is fiction and not fact. If you research what her daughters say about their childhoods you find very differing accounts and the evil she shows in face to face conversation (e.g. with her driver) does not have any witnesses. My other misgiving about the film is that it is simply too short to allow character development or even orientation so that I got the impression that her children stayed forever in their teens and she was suddenly 47. All in all historic context was missing completely.

This film is about the life of the famous and prolific author Enid Blyton, who wrote over 750 children books.

"Enid" is very powerful in portraying the character of Enid Blyton. Helena Bonham Carter portrays Enid Blyton to be a detached, phlegmatic, rude and deceitful hypocrite. This portrayal is very powerful, and I do hate Enid so much for her unloving ways towards her family. It is so effective, I feel so sorry for the husband and her children. The production is also of great quality, with high standards of costumes, sets and cinematography.

I used to pride myself for having read all the Famous Five books. If this portrayal of Enid Blyton's life is accurate, that I think I cannot put my hands on an Enid Blyton book again.

This film promulgates the stories spread about that Enid Blyton was a horrible person and a cold mother. This is not factual. If you read Barbara Stoney's very accurate biography - "Enid Blyton, The Biography" with a foreword written by Miss Blyton's own daughter Gillian - you will see that she adored her children and loved both her first and second husbands. She contributed enormous amounts of teaching aids to the teachers and children of the twentieth century, and should be remembered with love and admiration. Do not take this cinematic telling of her life as factual. It isn't. In her daughter's own words - "I was very close to my mother, and talked with her freely from early childhood." which disputes the notion of her having been a cold mother. I have read her biography, and whilst this film captures the atmosphere of the time, it does not capture the true events.

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!