Worked up beyond the power of articulation, Sheba runs out with the incriminating diary among the press lurking outside Barbara's door. She cannot bring herself to retaliate, however, but can only roar, nightshade queen of the mosh pit one last time. Suddenly bewildered and self-conscious, Sheba goes back inside with the notebook still in hand. She attempts to speak plainly to Barbara — elucidating, for instance, the insignificance of a merely polite invitation she had made some time back — and can only marvel that Barbara can't take in even this much. Finally, with exhausted and pitying generosity, Sheba returns the diary to its mad author and leaves, the surest sign that this is naturalism and not melodrama. Naturalism in an ironic-tragic vein, because Sheba isn't well suited to the changes that will be necessary from here on out and Barbara is incapable of them. Sheba at last understands what's been going on but what will her spiritual indolence be like without her illusions of safety? As for Barbara, we can guess what she'll be up to with the next compliant young thing she comes across.
Last but not least, this is a great stride forward for Richard Eyre, who manages to keep the highly internal intrigue from becoming self-consciously "literary" (practically a miracle after his work on Iris [2001] and the literal-minded yet prancingly self-pleased Stage Beauty [2004]). In terms of movement and complexity, Eyre's work here can be spoken of in the same breath as Fred Schepisi's adaptation of John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation (1993). Working with the super-alert present-tense cinematographer Chris Menges and the film editors John Bloom and Antonia Van Drimmelen, Eyre moves the story along swiftly and yet never descends into moviemaking "flash." You may not be aware of his hand, but that's because he gets both the emotions and the irony breathlessly right. The story fairly absorbs you. And what he's done for these actresses deserves some kind of monument.
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.