She had begun to feel strangely detached from the proceedings. "I was sort of watching myself," she recalls. "Smiling at what a silly I was being. It was as if I had become my own rather heartless biographer."
Next, I got out the toolbox from under the sink. Eddie's tools are terribly expensive and grand. I was nearly seduced by a hand-carved mallet with an ivory handle. But I settled in the end for a small, steel axe. (Less beauty, more power.) — Zoë Heller, What Was She Thinking? (Notes on a Scandal) (2003)
WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
In Notes on a Scandal, adapted by playwright Patrick Marber from Zoë Heller's witchily astute novel, Barbara Covett (Judi Dench) is a 60-something history teacher at a London comprehensive school, who, if she ever had high expectations of the career in education she began nearly 35 years ago, has long since given up on them.
Barbara is now a washed-out, scrub-haired, pinch-faced martinet who doesn't confine her sharp discipline to her own classroom. In all public spaces she speaks smartingly to the multi-ethnic "pubescent proles" from the school's catchment area, whom she despises because most of them will not profit from her instruction in ways she values. Barbara also provides voice-over narration read from a diary she has kept since the 1950s and we hear her refer to the students as "future shop assistants and plumbers. And doubtless the odd terrorist too." She plays the prison wardress and is effective precisely because she harbors no illusions about the students, none.
Barbara doesn't partake of her colleagues' idealism about education in any formal way — in the movie, for instance, she refuses to write a full-scale report of how her department could be improved. Her flinty expression tells her fellow "educators" that they are incapable of altering her rock-bottom estimate of them. And sometimes she just tells them, though not in so many words. Her point is not lost, however, because she is a mistress of words (and Marber's screenplay, though theatrically compacted and slightly altered from the original, makes for a wonderful read right alongside Heller's novel). On the subject of the school, Barbara's tone is arsenical.
Apart from her beloved cat Portia, Barbara does not find satisfaction outside work, either. A repressed lesbian, she had previously befriended Jennifer Dodd, a young female colleague who responded to the attention until Barbara grew too insistent. Barbara projected a shared life with the unwitting — and heterosexual — Jennifer. After Jennifer announced her engagement, she had to threaten Barbara with an injunction to keep her at bay.
.jpg?t=20130517094513)
Article comments
1 - Michael J. West
Nice review. I never saw this one; my wife went with a girl friend to see it and loved it, but also found it quite disturbing. (On that note, nice Siouxsie Sioux reference, too. :-D)
Doesn't it almost seem redundant at this point to say that Judi Dench turned in a masterful performance?
2 - Alan Dale
Thanks for the comment, Michael. Disturbing to identify with such a character, but also disturbing that loving Siouxsie Sioux is now a sign of middle-age! Mais oĂą sont les fucking neiges d'antan?
As I tried to say in shorter compass in the review, Judi Dench’s performances may generally be masterful on a technical level but are not necessarily appropriate for the material she’s given. She has a distinctively commanding air onscreen but her personality is less notable for what it gives than for what it withholds. This makes her technical skill more apparentâ€"what else is there to pay attention to?â€"but not very involving. She lacks the playfulness of many English theatrical crossovers, e.g., Edith Evans, Leslie Howard, Ralph Richardson, Laurence Olivier, Wendy Hiller, Vivien Leigh, Alec Guinness, Maggie Smith, Ian Richardson, a quality that makes me happy to watch them in anything. As a result, although directors will cast Dench in anything “classy,” her actual range is quite limited. Barbara in Notes on a Scandal is smack in the middle of that range so all the skill and even the reserve resonate for once, and in fact are highly amusing.
3 - Michael J. West
I suppose that's true. Dench's best work has always called for theatricality, technically precision, and humorlessness--she's easily the greatest Lady MacBeth I've ever seen--but I'm not sure it's an accident that she sometimes spins comedy out of that dourness. Witness her brief turn as Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love.
4 - Alan Dale
Shakespeare in Love would be an exception to my comments about her, but it may be an exception that proves the rule. How could she NOT get laughs in those two great roles in The Importance of Being Earnest and Pride & Prejudice? You'd have to work at it. Perhaps the humorlessness was ideologically motivated, but that doesn't make it more palatable.
5 - Michael J. West
Ideologically motivated? How do you mean?
6 - Alan Dale
British literary, theater, and film folk are generally pretty left-wing. I got the sense from the way Dench was presented as Lady Catherine in Pride & Prejudice--her delivery, the make-up, the lighting--that the intention was to show how truly horrid upper-class pride could be. That's part of Austen's intention, too, to make D'Arcy's pride seem less repellent by contrast. But Lady Catherine's pomposity in the book is laugh-out-loud funny, and it's a huge loss to emphasize an ideological point that's inherent in the character at the expense of the wit that is equally important.