Movie Review: Notes on a Scandal - You Were Temptation - Page 7

Cate Blanchett has always underwhelmed me, too, though in her case it's because she's so adaptable as to be forgettable while always appearing aglow with self-satisfaction, as if praise and stardom were hers by right, like income from a trust fund. Just as Dench's carefulness and reserve work for Barbara, however, Blanchett's sense of entitlement works for Sheba. It gives her a certain narcissism that explains why this likeable, intelligent woman would be such a dilettante — not just as an artist and teacher but in her private life as well. It helps enormously that director Richard Eyre shows us Sheba as Barbara sees her, in rapturous, silky slow motion while frankly preserving the insanity of her sexual caprice. (This is nailed down in the scene in which Steven breaks it off with Sheba, exactly as Barbara has spitefully predicted.)

Blanchett, a visual glory, draws us to Sheba yet does her share in dramatizing the perception that there are two, opposite ways of prolonging adolescent injudiciousness: by being totally out of touch with your feelings like Barbara, or by being too much in touch with them like Sheba. Barbara can't entirely repress her troubling emotions; they will out. But not all impulses are to be indulged equally, as Sheba learns startlingly late, that is, when her lover is younger than her daughter's boyfriend and in part only because the boy's mother pummels some sense into her and the police are alerted. (If one's superego is crucially underactive it will simply be externalized.)

After her exposure, Sheba leaves her house at Richard's request and hides from the tabloid press at Barbara's. In the third-act climax, Sheba, bored and uncertain to the point of distraction, puts on her old Siouxsie Sioux makeup, as if the answer lay behind her rather than before. She notices a gold star stuck to her foot and, in an expertly rhythmed sequence, goes from gold star to a crumpled journal page in the waste basket to a search for the full trove — Barbara's diaries, which reveal not only her feelings for Sheba and her plot to win her but the fact that it was she who informed on Sheba and Steven. When Barbara returns from a frugal outing at the supermarket, Sheba turns on her and Blanchett lets it rip, using vocal and emotional resources I had not previously suspected she possessed. It's a phenomenal scene, in which Blanchett not only extends herself as an actress but extends the character as well (Sheba finds some footing) at maximal dramatic pitch.

Sheba beats into Barbara, with tongue and fist, how Barbara's secret attachment and manipulativeness, her snideness and self-regard, appear to an observer whose disenchantment now equals her own. It is immensely, theatrically gratifying to have Sheba fling some home truths directly into the Gorgon's face, with a glass-splinter wit to match Barbara's own but an electrified physicality pushing it home. And the inadequacy of Barbara's responses jacks the comedy up that much further while deepening the pathos. When Sheba yells that she could get two years' prison as a result of Barbara's snitching, Marber has the older woman attempt to soothe her with, "They'll fly by! I'll visit every week." It's a miraculous high point, one of the crispest displays of pyrotechnical temperament in movie history and thoroughly dictated by the narrative structure. It provides as great a release for viewers as sex would have been for Barbara.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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