Notes on a Scandal
Notes on a Scandal plays like Rushmore by way of The Talented Mr. Ripley, and though it has its moments of exquisite creepiness, it’s not as fresh or smart as either.
The story outline is a familiar mashup of stalker movie beats and forbidden love flourishes. Cate Blanchett plays a beautiful upper-middle class British art teacher who has an affair with a 15 year old student. When a lonely, obsessive fellow teacher (Judi Dench, also the narrator) discovers the affair, she uses her knowledge of it, as well as Blanchett’s children and May-December marriage (to the always watchable Bill Nighy) as leverage to coerce the younger woman into what she intends (and believes) to be an ever deepening relationship. The movie never quite transcends its stalker movie narrative, and instead chooses to use the form, with its gradually escalating creep-factor, as a template for examining the perils and intersections of self-delusion, loneliness, and lust for youth.
It’s a well-made movie, with excellent performances from all three leads, but while it succeeds in being creepy, it is sometimes too focused on burying its nose in unpleasantness. Mined with dramatic explosions that give the actors a chance to show off, the movie revels in psychological misery, but it often seems primarily designed to toy with variations on self-delusion and suffering. Dench’s character is Tom Ripley but with less purposeful conniving and far more blinkered desperation, and if there’s some psychological insight in the film, it’s in her soul-deadening loneliness. Decades of emptiness and despair have eaten her up, carving away her ability to effectively self-analyze and causing her to build up an elaborate fantasy world of connections with others that do not really exist. Thus, her every action is an attempt to solidify those fantasies in the real world.
Blanchett and Dench are both superb, of course, with both actresses managing (for most of the film) to come off simultaneously unpleasant and sympathetic. Dench lets us peer into the fraught mental state of someone in the grips of violent self-deception, and her performance will likely get the most attention. But Blanchett deserves similar accolades for her work as the flighty, restless upper-middle class bohemian who manages to appear far more stable than Dench but is just as much a victim of her creepy, self-deluded passions. In a film riddled with internal deception that spins outward into misery and chaos, it’s her turn—fragile, innocent, without malice—that is most affecting. She has the most to lose, and so falls the hardest.
With its drab English hues, wintry milieu, and carefully watchful camera (which often feels as if it’s stalking the characters) the movie has the chilly aura of a cold, damp, winter’s day; just watching it you’ll want to bundle up in a scarf and overcoat. Effective as it is, its undiluted bleakness may be too much—an icy case around a heart that’s already cold and black.
Labels: movies
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