By Joshua Wertling
Staff Writer
Because of films such as Little Children, The Painted Veil and now Notes On A Scandal, perhaps art-house theaters these days should come with a warning that their movies may contain acts of adultery. However, these films seem to conjure up spectacular performances from the female leads, so maybe cheating isn't such a bad thing, artistically speaking. In Notes On A Scandal, Dame Judi Dench (Shakespeare In Love) and Cate Blanchett (Babel) put on an acting clinic while fusing Patrick Marber's (Closer) melodramatic screenplay with Richard Eyre's (Iris) unobtrusive direction to create great entertainment.
Dench portrays the conniving, manipulative Barbara, and Blanchett is the young, new art teacher Sheba. Barbara is a seasoned professor at the high school and hardly misses a beat about what goes on there. Sheba begins to feel comfortable confiding in Barbara about her personal life as the two build a strong relationship. When Barbara catches Sheba committing adultery with a 15-year-old student (Andrew Simpson), she decides to use the affair as blackmail in order to please her special desires. Sheba's older husband (Bill Nighy, Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest) is unsuspecting of the affair but is more suspicious about why Barbara is always lurking around ("What kind of spell has she cast on you?" he asks his wife when Barbara interferes with a family affair).
Barbara provides voiceover narration for this story - a smart decision, because while the narration is necessary in order to clarify this complex character's otherwise ambiguous motives, Marber also uses it to toss in some of the film's sassiest lines, and Dench delivers them in a deliciously sardonic and often sinister tone. Parts of the screenplay may feel a bit too much like a soap opera, but the characters are too convincing to allow the movie to ever sink to that low level. As in Marber's Closer, although one may despise some of the characters, they are still written with enough humanity that one could perhaps directly relate to some of them.
And even when their characters are at their most unappealing, Dench and Blanchett are electrifying enough to carry the film. Blanchett is becoming one of Hollywood's most consistent and adventurous actresses as she continues to pick a wide variety of roles and play all of them with obvious precision. (Recently, Blanchett performed an extremely poignant scene in Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel, and she was also the best thing about Steven Soderbergh's messy The Good German.) As Sheba, she is able to elicit sympathy for a type of person that today's mainstream society might find particularly unlikable, to say the least. She successfully forms a multilayered character that appears both innocent - when discussing her depressed and unfulfilled life with Barbara - and guilty - when she faces her honest husband, who searches for answers from her. Dench is equally perfect as the scheming puppet master; her wicked eyes burn a hole right through the vulnerable Sheba. This role as an unusual and elaborate villain could quite possibly be the one for which Dench will be most remembered many years on.
Since most movies predominantly star males, it is such a rare delight to see two actresses accomplish such great acting feats in the same film. If for nothing else, Notes On A Scandal shall always be remembered for that fortunate note.
Be the first to comment on this article!