Simply A Masterpiece

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Blistering performances.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

I enjoyed this film and thought all the performances were excellent. As I watched it, however, I couldn't help but think that no real person is as unremittingly awful as the Enid portrayed here. The film also implied that Enid's life was one of complete lack of fulfilment and success. Erm, this was one of the most loved and successful writers ever? I could imagine a totally different film where Enid's driven approach to writing and her 'neglect' of personal relationships would have been put down to her artistic genius. As it was, despite her huge success, the Enid here was basically portrayed as a failure and a bad person because she wasn't a chocolate-box mother, she had one affair and had one unhappy marriage. The film seems to be saying that despite her success she ultimately was a failure because she didn't pass the test as a wife and mother.For this reason, I actually thought the film was a bit sexist, although perhaps reflecting sexist attitudes of the time. A good watch in itself, but didn't make me feel I'd got to know Enid Blyton.

Quite by chance, British television recently showed on the same night biopics about two famous female children's authors of the early twentieth century, "Miss Potter" about Beatrix Potter and "Enid" about her younger contemporary Enid Blyton. I must admit that I never liked either of them when I was a child, although this had nothing to do with any prejudice against female writers; I continued to enjoy the works of E. Nesbit even after discovering that the "E" stood for "Edith", and I loved the historical novels of Rosemary Sutcliffe. Beatrix Potter's books, however, always struck me as twee and babyish, and as for Blyton I found her works dull and formulaic. (OK, I probably didn't use the word "formulaic" in those days, but when you had read one you had read them all. All 753 of them). I also disliked the preachy, moralistic strain in Blyton's works.In this film Blyton is played by Helena Bonham Carter, although there is no physical resemblance between them. All the photographs I have seen of Blyton show her as a severe-looking, unattractive woman, whereas Bonham Carter, in her early forties, is as lovely as she ever was. Helena, of course, was once Britain's reigning Queen of Period Drama, although she has now abdicated that particular crown in favour of Keira Knightley, with Carey Mulligan as heiress presumptive. "Enid" might appear to represent a return to the sort of role Helena was playing twenty years ago, but in fact the title character here is very different to the sweet young heroines she played in films like "Lady Jane" or "A Room with a View". As in the "Harry Potter" series, where she plays the evil Bellatrix Lestrange, she gets to play a villainess. The portrayal of Enid Blyton is this film is a remorselessly negative one. She is shown as snobbish and ruthlessly ambitious, caring for little except her own financial success. She is cold and unfeeling to her first husband, Hugh Pollock, to whom she is unfaithful. When during the war he leaves to take up an important command, she complains bitterly that he is putting his duty to his country before her. She poses as a lover of children, but neglects her own daughters Gillian and Imogen. She wants little to do with her mother and her two brothers. When she wants to marry her lover, a doctor named Kenneth Darrell Waters, she decides that she will divorce Hugh on the grounds of his (non-existent) adultery rather than allowing him to divorce her, and expects him to oblige her wishes. (There was a curious convention during the first half of the twentieth century that it was morally worse for a wife to cheat on her husband than vice versa; a woman who had been the guilty party in a divorce case would be forever branded as a harlot. Rather surprisingly, the English courts, which in other contexts held strictly to the maxim "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth", were prepared to turn a blind eye to the vast amount of perjured evidence that was manufactured to uphold the legal fiction that no married woman was ever guilty of adultery). Indeed, the only thing that seems to upset Enid is the rumour that her books are ghost-written. (This was a persistent rumour during her lifetime, largely because people could not believe that one woman could be so prolific. Today, it seems to be generally accepted that she did indeed pen every book that bears her name). Bonham Carter is a very talented actress, and her performance here is a good one, but it never becomes a really great one. Indeed, the script never gives her the chance to give a great performance, because the portrait of Blyton is so negative and one-dimensional, never allowing her any good qualities except an immense capacity for hard work. There are also good contributions from Matthew Macfadyen and Denis Lawson as Blyton's two husbands. Hugh Pollock was nine years older then his wife, whereas Macfadyen is in fact eight years younger than Bonham Carter, so the make-up department also deserve credit for making him seem credibly middle-aged. Another weakness of the film is that the early scenes were very rushed. In the space of a few minutes Enid goes from an Edwardian schoolgirl to a married, middle-aged author with two children in the 1930s. One of the film's theories is that Blyton's emotional difficulties in later life were the result of her coming from a broken home after her father, whom she idolised, left her mother, so it is unfortunate that her early life was not examined in greater detail. I never met Enid Blyton- she died when I was a young child- so for all I know she might have been every bit as unpleasant as the character portrayed here. I just wondered why the film-makers bothered to make a biopic of someone they obviously regarded as a prize bitch. 6/10

This drama, the first in a series entitled 'Women We Loved', has Helena Bonham-Carter portraying children's writer Enid Blyton. Although she is very good, and ably supported by Matthew McFadyen and Denis Lawson as her two husbands, this story suffers by presenting Blyton as one-dimensional, uncaring of her own family, and single-minded about her writing.Sumptuously shot and accurate to the time in which it is set, 'Enid' is nevertheless strangely unsatisfying, and I really would have liked to have seen a more rounded piece of biography. Yes, Blyton probably did have many faults, but according to this she is only one step back from the Wicked Witch of the West!

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!