Three and 1/2 Stars
It has been said that a friend is someone who knows everything about you and likes you anyway. The new film "Notes on a Scandal" takes that adage and twists and mangles it into one of the most riveting psychological thrillers of this new year.
The film, an adaptation of Zoe Heller's novel "What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal," introduces the audience to its narrator, Barbara Covett (Judy Dench). Barbara, a career teacher at St. George's School in north London, is a self-described "battleship," a woman who can silence an unruly class or dismiss her immediate supervisor with little more than a contemptuous arch of her eyebrow.
Despite her intimidating stature, however, Barbara lives a solitary and bitter existence. Her only joy comes from her cat and her daily journal writings, which smack of her elitist sense of morality and an acerbic perspective toward the world that surrounds her.
Barbara's interest is piqued when Sheba (Cate Blanchett), an upper-crust art teacher, arrives at St. George's. From Barbara's jaundiced view, she sees Sheba's belief that she can make a difference in the lives of her students as nothing more than pitiful naivete.
But then Barbara is slowly drawn to the new teacher because Sheba has so much of what Barbara doesn't. She's pretty, upper-class, liked by her students, married to an older man (Bill Nighy) who adores her, and the mother of two children.
Conversely, Sheba is in awe of Barbara because she seems so in control of her world at school. The two women begin to formulate a friendship.
Barbara, though, because of her isolation and repressed sexuality, reads more into the friendship than does Sheba.
Thus, when Barbara spies Sheba in a romantic tryst with one of her 15-year-old students (Andrew Simpson), she is devastated.
Barbara's disappointment isn't because she realizes Sheba is jeopardizing her own family and career.
No, it's because Barbara believes her own love has been betrayed, and to reciprocate for the pain she feels, Barbara begins to scheme how she can use her new-found knowledge of her friend's secret to further Barbara's own fantasy of an obsessive love.
Of course, with such flawed characters involved, things can only end badly for both women. To that end, "Notes on a Scandal" doesn't disappoint.
Still, the journey to that destination is no less fascinating than watching a car wreck about to occur. And no less catastrophic.
The difference is that the violence at the heart of "Notes on a Scandal" is not so much physical as it is psychological. Hence the tour-de-force performances from the film's star players, Dench and Blanchett.
As Barbara, Dench is at times withering, needy, scheming and, quite possibly, somewhat mad. She is a woman who controls life and people by compartmentalizing what she desires and destroying what she doesn't.
Blanchett 's physical contrast to Dench's deviously diminutive, frumpy spinster only serves to hide the decaying soul of Sheba.
As an adulteress and a child molester, Blanchett uses Sheba's beauty and social stature to do a better job of hiding the moral rot that lies within her.
Yet in the case of both women, one can't help but feel they are the victims of their own pathetic and lonely lives. Their's is a shared misery, even though they are far from aware of it.
Along the way, director Richard Eyre and screenwriter Patrick Marber also touch upon how issues of class and manners may contribute to their characters' warped states of mind. The efforts of all make "Notes on a Scandal" the engrossing thriller it aspires to be.