At the start of the school year, Barbara's eye is caught by Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett), the new art teacher. Though Barbara initially describes Sheba quite tartly, and not at all inaccurately, she soon senses that Sheba is "different." Nothing like squishily upbeat Sue Hodge (Joanna Scanlan) — whom Barbara refers to in the novel as "Fatty" and calls a "living anthology of mediocre sentiments" — who advises Sheba to console herself with the "gems" among the students.
In short order Barbara falls in love with Sheba, and a bond fortuitously forms between them when Barbara breaks up a fight in Sheba's class that the novice teacher plainly can't handle (and doesn't realize is about her). Sheba is so grateful she invites Barbara over for Sunday lunch with her older husband Richard (Bill Nighy) and their children — a petulant teenaged daughter named Polly (Juno Temple) and a son with Down's syndrome named Ben (Max Lewis), whom Barbara snidely pigeonholes in her diary as "a pocket princess" and "a somewhat tiresome court jester." After lunch, Sheba takes Barbara back to her home studio and confides lavishly in this woman she barely knows. The problem isn't that Sheba is imparting too much information but that she's unsuspectingly exciting Barbara, who will later preserve a fallen hair from Sheba's head between pages in her notebook and then save a seat at the school Christmas pageant for her as if they were attending it on a date.
When Sheba doesn't appear at the pageant, Barbara goes looking and spies her putting her clothes on after dallying with Steven Connolly (Andrew Simpson), a 15-year-old student. (In the book, when Barbara tells of the school's history as a Victorian orphanage it's hard not to think of Heller as giving sly new meaning to Dickens's Dotheboys Hall.) Barbara is infuriated by what she thinks of as a "betrayal," though it's only a betrayal of her fantasies, which Sheba is unaware of. Barbara's denial is so impenetrable that she expresses her anger at this "rejection" as inflexible rectitude. As she tells her diary, however, this "disappointment" actually presents an opportunity to insinuate herself further into Sheba's life.
Both women are unself-aware in ways that only entangle them further. After Sheba initially opens up to her after the lunch, Barbara (who is from a resolutely middle-class family but nonetheless "the more educated woman" compared to "posh" Sheba) writes mordantly of the "immediate incautious intimacy" in "bourgeois bohemia." This also means, however, that Sheba will be only too ready to confide every gradation of her affair to Barbara, as if the truth — which Sheba reveals in the light of her relatively innocuous habit of quasi-therapeutic self-examination — couldn't possibly harm her. Barbara makes Sheba promise to stop seeing Steven, which Sheba does without realizing what Barbara will read into this act of submission. In Barbara's mind, acutely observant and yet as emotionally turbulent as Polly's, this is the beginning of a love affair. For a living mummy like Barbara the absence of consensual signs and words is without significance.
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 où 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 apparent"what else is there to pay attention to?"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.