For little prestige pictures, timing is essential, and there’s no mistaking the strategy behind the release of “Notes on a Scandal.” This film opened in New York and L.A. in December to qualify for the year-end awards.
Check the cast list if you wonder why: Oscar faves Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett have meaty roles in this ultra-serious British picture. They deliver plenty of heavy breathing, but ultimately the movie is winded by the effort.
The story, as they used to say, is “torn from today’s headlines.” The scandal is about a young teacher having sex with a teenage student. But the more intriguing relationship is between two teachers.
Dench plays a fussy, entrenched teacher at a school where instructors are now mainly occupied with the job of policing kids. She doesn’t like the students or her fellow teachers, whom she sees as weak and permissive.
Then a new teacher, played by Blanchett, arrives. A youngish mother with a certain amount of glamour, she’s out of her depth with the rough students, but she befriends Dench.
Their friendship is already creepy – we see from the beginning that Dench is predatory and possessive about her companions – but really gets twisted when Dench observes Blanchett in a compromising position with a young male student.
Now the older woman has power, the power to blackmail. She’s a classic succubus character, and Patrick Marber’s screenplay has its best moments in illuminating human power games.
A bedraggled Judi Dench looks as though she’s trying to top Helen Mirren in “The Queen,” for frumpiest movie star turn of the year. (Mirren plays Queen Elizabeth, so she wins by default.) Dench certainly knows how to play this kind of tigress, and her beady-eyed intensity is convincing.
Blanchett is less powerful, but there’s no way this intelligent actress can be dull. The decision to give her a Mary Kay LeTourneau hairdo is hitting the nail a little too squarely on the head.
The film also gets good work from Bill Nighy (recently seen with a squid on his face in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” sequel), as Blanchett’s much older husband. But even these fine actors are overindulged by director Richard Eyre (“Iris”), who takes a literal, unsubtle approach to the material.
Sure enough, Dench and Blanchett were nominated for Golden Globe awards (an insipid group of voters, but supposedly an Oscar bellwether); Nighy got a nomination, too. Score one for the marketers.
Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench star in “Notes On A Scandal.”
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