Notes on a Scandal

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source: Notes on a Scandal

Just released on DVD its a story about a selfish one-dimensional school teacher Sheba Hart ( Cate Blanchett) who has sex with one of her students younger than her daughters boyfriend. Another elderly teacher Barbara Covett ( Judy Dench) who is close to retirement discovers Sheba Hart's pedophilia and actually witnesses it. As Barbara is a single very lonely women with a dysfunctional personality she seeks to take advantage of Sheba Hart's crime by using emotional blackmail. The major problem with this film is that the director tries to paint a picture of sympathy for Sheba Hart's predicament and portrays Covett's dysfunctional and isolation illness as an evil thing. Cate Blanchett's acting reaches a new low with her stare-away glances and her delivery of script like she is reading lines and not responding to the actor opposite until they finish their lines and dead give-away of poor acting. More pathetically Pedophile Sheba gets away with a ten month sentence and a saved marriage due to a sympathetic Husband however her daughter's response is left unknown from there. Anyone who comes away sympathetic to Cate's Character is suffering gender bias if not discrimination as we know what happens to Pedophile Male teachers. The whole film is implausible and serves no purpose in meeting the challenge of understanding Pedophile behaviour or the dysfunctional and lonely isolated elderly and their personality problems. Its an attempt to use a controversial subject for sensationalist marketing a a film with a thin plot and poor acting except for Judy Dench who is a great actress.

Certainly a very stylish drama, riveting and brilliant, rising above the modern-day thrillers due to stunning performances of two very gifted actresses. It's both dramatic and funny, Judy Dench and Cate Blanchett are delicious and so talented that they turn a misanthrope cat and mouse game into a politically correct entertaining account. This strong emotional battle is not only something about teacher-student sex, it's also an obsessing blackmail. Without exaggerating it could be deemed "memorable", as revelations abound, tempers flare all the time and every single confidence is shared. Never boring and deep.

Brilliantly summed up by Film Threat as "ennui with a pedigree", this is thespi-centric melodrama of the most overwrought, self-regarding and unconvincing kind. As the antisocial, delusional old maid Barbara and silly Sheba, the object of her obsession, Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett are undeniably magnificent. Bill Nighy also deserves praise for his sensible take on the thankless role of Sheba's husband. However, one's a misanthropic basket case with a blackmailing heart; one's a weak-willed not-so-clever intellectual who wants it all and is astonished when she can't have it, and the third is a man who ditched one wife for a younger woman and is flabbergasted when she gives him a taste of his own medicine. Who are we rooting for here? They all deserve everything they get. And is giving Sheba and husband a Down's syndrome child supposed to engender sympathy? Smacks of cold, hard manipulation to me. As for the 'scandal'… female teacher bonks 15-year-old pupil: stop the press. Distasteful and reproachable but not uncommon, the story would barely interest the local press beyond its breaking week, let alone prompt the national paparazzi to camp on the offender's doorstep for almost a month. That the disgraced Sheba would move into Barbara's home in the first place is highly unlikely anyway. If - as many critics would have it - Patrick Marber's adaptation of Zoe Heller's acerbic bestseller is a screen writing "masterclass", the future of cinema looks bleak. Necessary character development is jettisoned in favour of ridiculous contrivances to create a multiplex-friendly psychothriller which both stereotypes Brits and insults the American audience for whom it is so clearly intended. Even the ending hints at a sequel. Amplifying the histrionics is a score from Philip Glass that makes Wagner sound positively inert. Even the act of washing dishes is treated like the coming of legions of Valkyries. Actually, it's the perfect accompaniment to such an overblown and overpraised film.

I didn't find the subject matter disturbing, but rather a thinly veiled attempt at storytelling. The film took a wonderful veteran actress, Judi Dench, and dumped her into a whining, bitter old woman who has nothing better to do with her life than try to destroy the lives of others in a vain effort to make herself happy. While her dialog was well-written, her character's actions was simply not. She never arcs, but simply bumbles along from one attempt after another. The audience is begged - because they wouldn't do it voluntarily - to empathize with Dench's character, and I just didn't bite. I can't empathize with someone who sucks the life out of other people - in a completely deceitful and whiny way - in order to get what she wants. Cate Blanchett had an amazing character to play, and carried off the Bohemian art teacher part well - but again, the storyline was so weak that we are left wondering why we should care about her at all. Her character is merely immoral and doesn't redeem herself in any way. Yes, it's a story of betrayal, blackmail, and the consequences of wrongdoing, and it has the standard script components of a few significant twists and turns. It starts out with a potential promise to deliver, but dives straight downhill from there, with an ending that leaves the viewer wondering if there was simply a lack of consensus by the filmmakers on how to end it.

I watched this film carefully, and then tossed it. Instead of a tale about manipulation, loneliness, crises, fear, and forgiveness (subjects on which the film is admirably cogent), the screenplay is marred by an insistence on focusing on the subtextual and contextual m.o. of the supreme manipulator, Judy Dench, who strives to achieve a lesbian conquest. Dame Dench is alternately written as a desperate spinster lesbian (straight out of Well of Loneliness), a vampire preying on young girls, a delusional stalker (who evidently needed a restraining order), and a contrived, "evil" woman motivated by lust. This is nothing but a bad caricature of other bad caricatures: The Children's Hour, Basic Instinct, Maedchen in Uniform, etc. I'm surprised such simplistic, sloppy, phobic writing is still perfectly acceptable across continents. One of the worst films I've seen in at least 2 years, and that's including Smoking Aces.

We were so happy that NOTES ON A SCANDAL opened locally and went to see it this afternoon. Opening weekend here, but a whopping six people in the theatre. Strange. It wasn't long before I found out why. Horrible musical score, wretched photography, overacted, way overdirected, and unrelated to anything resembling human behavior. After about ten minutes one of the three couples left. The rest of us stuck it out. Our reward for enduring this: we got to see Cate sit on a toilet and wipe her butt. Wow. We never got to see Garbo or Katherine Hepburn do that. What an accomplishment.

I'd firstly like to point out that I am English so I'm not 'bashing' the film because it's British and nor am I 'bigging it up'. The acting is good but other than that there is nothing to recommend it. Basic plot is Judi Dench plays an elderly, manipulative lesbian who's slant on life and reality is very skewed. Cate Blanchett being a young teacher who becomes the focus of her attention in a 'Fatal Attraction' kind of way. The young teacher has an affair with a student which is something that the elder teacher can use to manipulate her with. Sounds interesting enough but trust me, it's not! The film plods along starting from nowhere and funnily enough ends up in the exact same spot. Nobody learns anything during the entire hour and a half which for me was extremely boring to watch. The 'thrilling' and 'affair' sections of the film come across as dull. It didn't feel as though the film had any life to it. After viewing it I seriously felt like I'd just wasted a small portion of my life. Overall, utterly pointless. Some may like it but I suspect that many wont.

Rarely have I seen Dame Judi Dench on top of her game as with Notes on a Scandal. She's usually a good show in any film she's in, but here she's perfect for the role of Barbara, who has been a professional teacher in a high school all her life, and is well respected, but can't seem to get enough of her attachments. There's a first one to a woman we won't see during the course of the film (chiefly because she put a retraining order on Barbara), and then enters in Sheba (Cate Blanchett, beautiful as ever, which may be a small part of the point), who becomes a focal point of attention for Barbara. And then when she discovers a terrible secret regarding her new 'friend'- an affair Sheba's having with one of her 15 year old students- there's a subtle form of blackmail that comes into play, and that becomes a further fantasy in her notebooks. Throughout all of this Dench never breaks from making this a totally believable, broken, but very solid woman who's gone through a life of misery only to want to seek happiness on the other side. One might almost feel sorry for her, in the end, if she wasn't such a dingbat. It might be also my favorite Dench performance I've seen to date (albeit I'm not all up on her complete catalog of work). She's not only convincing on the level of the obviousness of her character, vindictive but sweet, sensitive but cunning, and always with that underlying wit that the British have even in the most dire of circumstances, and I couldn't see anyone else playing her after a while. But it's not just her that makes Notes on a Scandal worthwhile. The screenplay by Patrick Marber, from what must be an equally absorbing and humanistic book, is sharp and intelligent in ways that American filmmakers wish they could make mind-f***er movies like today. There's understatement here and there that undercuts some scenes, like when Sheba has to confess to Barbara after being caught with the boy the first time, a very slight tension each knows on each side. And even when things start to get worse and worse, and the truth comes out in the worst way possible (not just for Sheba, destroying her family which includes her husband played by the great Bill Nighy and her two dysfunctional children, but for Barbara as well), there's still some glimmers of dark comedy in there, which one might think would be impossible considering the dangerous pit-falls that could come with such topical, practically controversial subject matter. My favorite of this is when Sheba finds out her own darkest secret from Barbara, and inexplicably in her old 80s makeup again no less. Not that I thought the film was without flaws- chiefly that, oddly enough, it wasn't long enough at 90 minutes (structurally it ended up working out, but considering how good the characters made the material out to be, I was surprised how quickly Marber and director Eyre got into the affair material), and Phillip Glass's musical accompaniment isn't quite fit with the rest of the material most of the time (I was wondering when Errol Morris would show up, truth be told). But I overlook these flaws mostly for the sake of how superlative everything else is done. The performances are all uniformly compelling and with equal measures of understandings in neuroses in one another, and the ending particularly leaves a chilling spell not unlike one found in the Cable Guy. It's probably the best "chick-flick" you haven't yet seen this year.