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Trailer for "Notes on a Scandal"

It’s certainly not every movie that asks you to sympathize with a teacher who has an affair with an underage student. Notes on a Scandal gives us a woman who sleeps with a 15-year-old boy and portrays her as a victim. It’s a reflection of the filmmakers’ cleverness and the two powerhouse leading performances that we’re even temporarily inclined to give Sheba Hart, the offending pedagogue, any benefit of the doubt.

Sheba (Cate Blanchett) is a diffident, thirty-something art teacher in a London working-class high school, new to both the profession and the school. Steven (Andrew Stevens) is cheeky, aggressively daring, academically unengaged, and the pursuer in this out-of-bounds relationship.

But this isn’t the primary human interaction in Notes. That involves Sheba and Barbara Covett (Judi Dench), an older, much more formidable and much less liked teacher at the school. She’s also needful, like Sheba, but in her own bent, psychologically rancid way, and a competitor for Sheba’s attention. And she’s dangerous. It’s her discovery of the teacher-student transgression that convinces Barbara there’s a way open for her to make Sheba her “special friend.”

The movie was adapted by playwright Patrick Marber from Zoe Heller’s popular novel What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal, which was composed of Barbara’s diary entries. Marber and director Richard Eyre have turned these into a narrative commentary voiced by Dench, thus expanding the novel’s subjective, deliberately hermetic scope, on the whole successfully. This enlargement makes more explicit and objective Barbara’s perverted, self-serving perception of herself and the world around her. The film widens the portrayal to show some of the impacts on others of Barbara’s secret campaign to win Sheba’s allegiance and subservience. Sheba is now an actual character, not just a pathologically misrepresented object of the other woman’s longing and machinations.

Notes is one of two current films that rely heavily on a narrator’s comments, but the other, Todd Fields’ Little Children, tries too hard to impose a substitute for the all-knowing authorial voice. [Ed. note: Originally slated to open in Buffalo this weekend, Little Children has been indefinitely rescheduled.] Notes makes this woman’s comically disdainful complaints, conspiratorial observations and sad but dismaying self-justifications into a much more successful device.

The film takes Sheba’s victimization and struggle as its center, and it largely succeeds in making them involving and persuasive, at least for much of its length. Dench and Blanchett, both Oscar nominees for this film, lend these dynamics vitality and passion. Dench’s performance is most crucial, of course, and she imparts a mordant pathos to the character, not an easy combo to deliver.

In gaining this dynamism, the film loses something of the disconcertingly comic discrepancies in Barbara’s personal chronicle between her ideas and what we grasp must really be happening. And it goes wrong in making the character such a caricatured poison pill, so condescendingly superior it’s a wonder her colleagues tolerate her company to even the limited extent they do. Her cluelessness works better on the page. And Sheba’s spell of personality deterioration near the movie’s end gives Blanchett an opportunity for some crazy lady stuff and grotesque makeup, but it dissipates some plausibility.

In the end, Notes is a very clever film, but in a curious way, smaller than the novel.