Thus, what Barbara experiences as intolerable vulnerability looks like predation from the outside, and the moviemakers don't press us to resolve our ambivalence. Still, Notes on a Scandal is more fascinating the more you can identify with maddening Barbara — to see yourself as others may have seen you at those times when you have projected your own far-fetched hopes onto someone else, or made demands on people who don't realize you think they're offering what you've tacitly accepted as yours. Identification with Barbara darkens the outré anecdote into mourning shade. One of Marber's very best additions is Polly's line when she sees Barbara coming to speak to her mother after the scandal has broken: "Oh, Jesus wept! The spectre at the feast!" At certain times someone might have said this about almost any one of us with equal justice.
It also makes a huge difference that we do not have the same access to Sheba's interior as to Barbara's. If we did, the temptation would be too great to identify with the pretty one and thus excuse the affair that puts her in Barbara's clutches, which would be to turn naturalism into melodrama. At the same time, the movie's Sheba is not the baffling creature she is in the novel, who ends up a husk, in Barbara's keeping. The movie's Sheba had to be different from the book's shifty, perverse, and arrogant adulteress, because any actress has too much presence to be that creepy without putting us off the story.
The movie's Sheba is a downy vision of how money and class make swans of certain Englishwomen, which is key to her justification of her sexual indiscretion. The world simply is nothing like the swan pond she expected. Sheba looks longingly at an old photo of herself as a kohl-eyed punk as if to ask, How did I lose what I had? She also plays Siouxsie and the Banshees' 1980 LP Kaleidoscope for Steven, hoping to regain what she lost, not realizing the trap that nostalgia for adolescence sets. Without seeming inordinately spoiled, Sheba clearly feels she deserves a little something more when it presents itself in an unlikely, not to mention illegal, form.
Thus, in the movie Sheba is as articulate, "creative," loving, and hopeful as nature and nurture could make her, so we can understand why ordinary life would not be fulfilling in the way she hoped it would be. At the same time, while Blanchett's Sheba may be more lovely in transgression than we would be, the movie casts Barbara's cold eye on her rationalizations and puts a stop to any romantic daydreaming on our part. The movie presents Sheba more sympathetically than Heller did, and even somewhat indulgently, but the book's fundamental astringency remains.
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.