Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
2/11/07
Human beings need certain
things to physically survive: food, water, clothing and shelter.
But our highly evolved brains require something else as well: connection.
We seek it through friends, lovers, pets, soap opera characters and, in
certain desperate situations, soccer balls. Without it, we will surely
go mad. Mad like the aptly named Barbara Covett (Judi Dench), who,
in the extraordinary new film Notes on a Scandal, turns her attention
to a new co-worker in her desperate, endless quest to... connect.
Both Barbara and newly hired
Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett) are teachers at a British high school.
Embittered Barbara has retreated into a position of being feared enough
to babysit her students without incident. While the other teachers
turn in bound, book-length reports on their plans for their classes in
the new year, hers consists of two sentences hand-written on a piece of
paper. Sheba has spent a decade caring, along with her much-older
husband Richard (Bill Nighy), for their Downs Syndrome-afflicted son and
is now trying to re-enter the workforce. Barbara, whose free time
is spent entirely with her cat and her diary, takes an intense interest
in Sheba, watching and documenting her every move until a chance opportunity
to do her a favor opens the door to conversation, coffee, and an invitation
to dinner. The socially backward older woman immediately hates the
casual, friendly Harts, and finds that Sheba is also looking for escape
from her domestic situation when she spies her having sex with Steven (Andrew
Simpson), one of her students. This is the break Barbara's really
been waiting for: by telling Sheba everything she knows but promising
not to tell as long as certain conditions are met, she cements their friendship
into something far more to her liking. Never mind that Sheba is now
clearly frightened, nervous and insincere when they're together.
Now, she NEEDS Barbara. But even this arrangement is not enough,
because Miss Covett needs far more than a friend.
Told through the icy, disturbing
prose of Barbara narrating from her diary, Notes on a Scandal is
a brilliant, unflinching look into the dark heart of loneliness.
Dench is amazing: watch how clear she makes it that Barbara forgot
decades ago how to pretend that dinner invitation doesn't feel like the
most important thing that's ever happened. Her body language when
she wildly overdresses for the occasion and then puts it off on an “appointment.
Later. In Town.” And listen to the way she wraps her mouth
around not only putting gold stars in her diary on her very best days,
but then punches the words “This was a gold STAR day.”
It would be easy enough for
the story to view Barbara as a diabolical spinster fiend looking to ruin
the happiness of the poor, nice people around her. After all, Hollywood
made that movie a couple dozen times in the years following Fatal Attraction.
But what makes Notes on a Scandal special is the way it not only
made me feel so badly for her at the same time I feared what she would
do next, but how it shows all its' characters to be guilty of harboring
similar desires. Isn't Sheba taking advantage of young Steven in
a very similar way? Or, once we learn more about the “underprivileged”
background Steven told her about, is it the other way around? And
what about Richard, who left his own previous wife for Sheba when she was
only 20? One of the strengths of Patrick Marber's excellent screenplay
is that he leaves it for us to search our own hearts for why these characters
are so willing to wreck their lives pursuing these relationships.
There are no boiled bunnies or butcher knives in play, only the natural
human need to be loved driving people to do what society cannot allow.
I've mentioned Dench already
and should do so again: I didn't think I could see another actress
give a better performance in a 2006 movie than Helen Mirren's in The
Queen, but she's done it. Blanchett impresses as well, showing
us the tightrope Sheba knows she's walking from the moment Barbara learns
of her secret without a single line of dialog on the subject. And
Nighy adds to his growing list of strong performances as Richard's oblivious
cheerfulness slowly gives way to suspicion and rage.
Director Richard Eyre stages
all this with a perfect eye toward detail and human behavior, keeping the
fires of a thriller burning at all times through the characters' fear of
having both their crimes and their feelings discovered. Having never
read Zoe Hiller's novel What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal,
I can't say with certainty how much of the sensational dialog comes from
her and how much from Marber, but either way, his screenplay adaptation
is outstanding.
I generally find this sort
of thriller to be unsatisfying, and Notes on a Scandal tells me
why: if a film can't make you not only see why the characters do
horrible things but feel it as well, the story is just a pointless
chance to gawk at “bad people”. But as much as I feared and despised
Barbara Covett, I felt for her as well: there, but for the grace
of the people in our lives, go us all. |
