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NOTES ON A SCANDAL
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As an athlete ages, his range of skills narrows even as his ability in a few areas increases; by career's end, he may be able to do only a single thing, but that uniquely well (think Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and the sky hook, or Barry Bonds and the home run swing). Something similar happens with movie actors -- perhaps the combination of fame, too many projects, talk shows, and magazine covers discourages risk-taking, but when an actor hits a certain visibility, the result is caricature. William Hurt has never been worth a nickel since The Accidental Tourist froze his face into melancholy; Harrison Ford lost it with The Mosquito Coast, and Al Pacino's career can be divided into speaking (everything before Dog Day Afternoon), occasionally declaiming, and full post-shouting mode (everything after Scent of a Woman, hoo-hah!).
In similar vein, once upon a time Dame Judi Dench (84 Charing Cross Road) could convey fragility and tenderness (cf. Mrs. Brown), but after copping a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for a mere eight minutes of bristle and snap as Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love, she appears perfectly willing to cash Hollywood's checks by delivering bi-chromatic portrayals, as in her voiceover-narrator heroine, Barbara Covett, in Notes on a Scandal.
Bah (as she is universally called) is a misanthropic ("Children are feral"), pessimistic ("in the old days, we took away their comics and gum, now we search for knives and drugs and they call that progress"), no-nonsense history teacher at St. George's School. By day she rules by imperial presence, and by night she confides, in perfect Palmer-style school calligraphy, to her accepting diary and the movie-going audience. Then her eye alights on Sheba -- young, earnest, hopeless , a Sylvia Barrett caught running up the down staircase, full of earnest interest in teaching the students to think and care about the world, while Bah simply wants them to learn reading, writing, and 'rithmetic.
Sheba (Cate Blanchett, Oscar and Lucinda) is upper class, vapidly self-confident, ready to spill intimate personal details about her life married to much older but with-it former college professor Richard Hart (the redoubtable Bill Nighy, Love, Actually). Sheba is so entirely used to the attentiveness bestowed upon the object of crushes that when she enters a room, she cannot help herself but slightly shake her blonde hair and tilt her chin, the better to expose her lissome throat. She is fully realized by Ms. Blanchett, a versatile and dedicated actress whose ability is still rising, her range continuing to expand. She can submerge herself beautifully into small roles (Meredith Logue in The Talented Mr. Ripley), adopt an accent and personality (Veronica Guerin), or parody a breathless journalist (Jane Winslett- Richardson in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou). She more than holds her own with Ms. Dench, even as the story moves by turns into ever deeper darkness.
Notes on a Scandal could have been the movie adaptation an Iris Murdoch novel -- had there been many more emotionally twisted characters, and more clever ones at that; instead, because the story is told so exclusively from Bah's perspective, all the other characters behave with motivations that cannot withstand a few moments' reflection. And the revelations would have been more surprising had they not been foreshadowed with leaden-footed presaging music, or had the peripheral characters not been so cutely named. Dench's character is Bah Covett, the headmaster is Sandy Pabblem (the reliable Michael Maloney, A Midwinter's Tale), the loving husband Rich Hart, the sappy schoolteacher Ted Mawson. Any questions?
Bah is a young person's simplistic conceptualization of a single old woman, and in this as in much else the story fails; nevertheless, seeing Nighy, Blanchett, and even the limited late-career Dench work as an ensemble scrapes Notes on a Scandal out of the Red.