She remarks that she was a quiet girl and dissembles to Sheba by saying that she never had time to have children, but even as a lesbian Barbara has faded and withered without having bloomed. It's apparent she has no memories to carry her into old age, and it's this depth of dustiness that puts people off and makes every new day as bleak as that past. The stern exterior, the commanding air, which present the very image of adult authority, result from sexual repression that has left her chaotically delusional: under the crusty shell of a drab old maid bubble the gooey insides of a lovesick girl who exults about her flaxen-haired "friend" to her diary and plasters the pages with gold stars. But her repression is hers; Marber explicitly refuses to lay it off on the "deferred gratification stock" from which she comes. As we see during a Christmas get-together, Barbara's family attempts to accept her as a lesbian; she coldly says she doesn't know what her sister is talking about.
Barbara is believably repellent but much of her acerbic commentary is dead-on, and many of us would love to treat bureaucratic paper-shuffling with the open contempt it deserves. In the book, Heller gives Barbara more "devastating" speeches on various topics: the "unrelenting sanctimony" and "titillated fury" of the press coverage of statutory rape cases; her colleagues' "do-gooding fantasies" of "making a difference"; the tendency of "bleeding hearts" to concoct "soppy rationalizations for delinquency". Marber understandably had to trim them because onscreen they would probably sound smug, editorializing, as if we were supposed to like Barbara because we agreed with her.
When it comes to Barbara's early comments about Sheba's sense of entitlement, they are devastatingly right and funny, even if tonally off (too much feeling invested). But let's be frank, even when Barbara's comments descend to meanness — with respect to Sue Hodge and Ben — it's possible to identify with her because you know her disappointment has cut her off from other people and she has no idea what to do about it. Heller has constructed character with classic novelistic scrupulousness and Marber, whose original work is rather more vulcanized, fully respects it.
The narration goes back to the beginnings of naturalistic prose fiction in the epistolary novel, replicating every nuance of the character's personality in her own voice. At the same time, however, despite Barbara's "wish to be as rigorously and unsparingly truthful as possible" about herself in both book and film, we gather so much more information about Barbara than she intends to impart or would acknowledge as true that she is also that distinctively modern-ironic creature, the unreliable narrator, in the tradition of Ford Madox Ford's John Dowell and Nabokov's Humbert Humbert. In fact, Barbara is no less an object of irony than the people she describes so scathingly, and as much as any movie I can think of Notes on a Scandal balances the audience's compassion for, amusement at, and aversion to its protagonist.
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.