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Notes on a Scandal review
:. Director: Richard Eyre
:. Starring: Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett
:. Running Time: 1:38
:. Year: 2006
:. Country: USA
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Judi Dench is the appropriately-named Barbara Covett, a wrinkled and fortuitous London school teacher nearing retirement. A feared disciplinarian in the classroom, she's the school's most pronounced cynic, deriding her students and fellow teachers while simultaneously extolling her own virtues as a consistent, moral educator. She's also a lesbian who, years before, was involved in a rather ambiguous relationship with a much younger co-worker.
Left alone, however, Barbara has nothing but her fantasies, her savage obsessions, which play out for us as daily journal entries. In the film's opening we see that Barbara has volumes upon volumes of notebooks, all full, all presumably documenting her disastrous fixations, her doomed relationships, and lurid school gossip.
With the arrival of a new art teacher, a youthful and inexperienced woman named Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett), Barbara once again becomes exceedingly smitten. Striking up an overly one-sided friendship, she spends her holidays with the Hart Family: Older husband Richard (Bill Nighy), son Ben (Max Lewis), and daughter Polly (Juno Temple). Barbara becomes a fixture in their household, even after learning that Sheba has been having relations with a fifteen year-old student named Steven Connolly (Andy Simpson). Only then, she tells us through a journal entry, does she decide to use this newfound information to her inauspicious advantage.
Dench's performance is, without a doubt, the film's foundation. Covett is cruel but pitiable, sad but loathsome; her moments of comfort and compassion, however rare, are profound and spoken from deep within her eyes, while her outbursts of wrath could strip the paint from walls. Every moment she's on screen is cinematic beauty disguised as a woman's life-long emotional and psychological apocalypse. Her eyes, her face, the movements of her hands as she writes and smokes—every character construct seems detailed and deliberate, as though this fictional storm has been fermenting insider Dench for years. Barbara Covett lives for her manic passions, all of which seem to kill a small part of her while feeding some underlying need for more.
Similarly, performances by Blanchett and Nighy are incredibly complex, their emotions hinging on a single line or contorted frown. Philip Glass's score, derided by some as inconsistent and poorly written, isn't so, and in fact adds to the film's dark, lurid tone. And while Patrick Marber's screenplay, based on the novel by Zoe Heller, pivots at times on the ridiculous—odd jokes, wild breakdowns—and is so entirely self-contained it could easily have been staged in any theatre, Notes on a Scandal is a thorough and sublime delight.
Adam Balz Terry
 Movie Reviews: American Films
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