Enid (2009), a film review

Earlier this week I managed to watch Enid (2009). It’s a film which has been on my radar for a while because it tells the story of Enid Blyton and, if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll know that I find her an incredibly fascinating character. Enid Blyton is messy. She’s brutal, direct, determinedly readable, casually cruel, and embraces every problematic trope under the sun. She hates anybody called Anne (genuinely: if you’re called Anne in an EB book, everybody hates you. Even the author). And yet she’s still here. Definitive. Provocative.

The film itself is a fairly straightforward biopic. The adult Enid is played by Helena Bonham-Carter who brings to the role a deeply determined ferocity. She is a woman who knows what she wants and is often deeply unlikeable in her pursuit of it. She is neglectful of her loved ones, possessed of a casual cruelty to her children, and cuts contact with her family as soon as she is able. There’s a particularly poignant moment later on in the film where one of her brothers comes to inform her of their mother’s death and Bonham-Carter plays it so well. She quivers with a kind of rage at being interrupted in her new life by her old, of being inconvenienced, of being made to face the world which lies beyond that which she has crafted so carefully. And yet underneath it all, a sadness that she doesn’t even have the vocabulary to understand let alone realise.

(I am increasingly intrigued by unlikeable women on screen who are allowed to be unlikeable. To not be redeemed. To not be made better).

As a whole, the film plays out in a fairly expected manner and increasingly mines the thread of Blyton’s prodigious creative output against public doubt. She is repeatedly provoked by public comments that she must have ghost writers because she simply can’t have written as much as she has. It’s an easy, tempting claim to make and you can see why people made it. Her output is awe-inspiring, shocking. But I don’t really have time for claims of ghost writers. Not only would she had been hideous to work with, she’s too present in her work to be detached from it. Yes you can mimic Blyton and do a bang up job of it. But I think there’s something unmistakeable hers in everything she wrote, even in her thinnest of texts, her most casual of poems.

There was also an interesting scene regarding Blyton’s uterine health and about how her uterus was underdeveloped. Here it was linked towards her determination to have children and while I see it as relevant here, I do have to admit I always find it a slightly problematic angle to take in terms of storytelling. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard about the bodily issues of male authors (maybe I have? It just seems a slightly reductive thing in certain contexts …).

As a whole, Enid really is a very watchable thing. The remarkable Ramona Marquez pops up in a role as one of Enid’s children whilst the ever-watchable Denis Lawson does good work as Kenneth Waters. From what IMDB says, it was all recorded in a remarkably short time-frame and that energy and purpose really does suffuse the film with a sense of pace. Sometimes it’s a little too quick but that’s the nature of such projects like this. Everything’s done in time for tea. It’s all rather meta, if you ask me.

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I hope you enjoyed this post! If you’d like to know more about my thoughts on children’s literature, then I’m available for teaching and lecturing. You can also read my own books for children.