Notes on a Scandal

Rating

Director

Richard Eyre

Screenplay

Patrick Marber (Novel What Was She Thinking: Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller)

Length

90 min.

Starring

Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett, Bill Nighy, Andrew Simpson

MPAA Rating

R (For language and some aberrant sexual content)

Review

A lonely teacher makes a play for a fresh teacher who gets herself involved with a student. Notes on a Scandal features top notch performances in a film that defies the conventional wisdom of obsession.

Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett) has a near perfect life. Her family loves one another and she’s just attained a job at a local high school where she’ll teach art. When she becomes involved with one of her students, the nosy disciplinarian teacher Barbara Covett (Judi Dench) pounces on the affair and uses it as an excuse to get close to the woman with whom she is smitten.

The relationship takes bizarre twists as Sheba finally understands why Barbara is so obsessed with her abandoning her affair. While it is clear Barbara has emotional feelings towards Sheba, the depth of her treachery knows limitless bounds.

Though Notes on a Scandal has its flaws, its talent in front of the lens is certainly not among them. Giving the performance of her career, Judi Dench trashes those old misconceptions of her playing doughty queens and grandmothers. Here, she’s vicious, ruthless and entertaining in a way we haven’t seen since What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Matching her performance near perfectly, Cate Blanchett turns in another stellar performance. Together, we find two of cinema’s hardest working and most talented thesps duking it out in the film for emotional and unstable superiority.

Director Richard Eyre doesn’t motivate the audience as much as he should as the film feels somewhat distant and inaccessible. The screenplay by Patrick Marber, adapted from the novel by Zoe Heller, makes moral ambiguity a hitch post for the rest of the film.

In Sheba’s husband Ricahrd (Bill Nighy), we have the moral middle ground for the film. Nighy seldom turns in such an understated and interesting supporting performance for two brazen and forefront lead characters. Morality cannot be thought of in terms of black and white and that’s one of the themes lying beneath the film’s surface that Eyre could have brought forward.

Sheba is loving, caring and works to better the lives of her family but her attraction to an underage teenager makes her decisions suspect and moderately questionable. Barbara is obsessed but knows what Sheba’s doing is wrong. Up to that point, the two are reasonably balanced. Barbara insinuates herself into Sheba’s life using the affair as her wedge. Though they were friends prior to this occurrence, that fact deteriorates until the film’s end where the two are bitterly fighting for their emotional stability.

Notes on a Scandal feels more campy upon reflection than it did upon viewing. At first, the film takes on a rather eerie Fatal Attraction mentality, but eventually devolves into a Single White Female attitude. The movie starts off very serious in tone but when the two leads have their final confrontation in Barbara’s cozy apartment, it takes on an almost surreal edge. Those moments bring into clarity the absolute lunacy of the obsession and bring it down to a level of popcorn entertainment.

Review Written

February 3, 2007