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School of scandal

Richard Eyre's film is more theatrical than thoughtful
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
April 4th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
"But my Elizabeth won an Oscar, you cow!" Battling divas in a murky melodrama.
Next to Scorsese’s mob opera, The Departed, Richard Eyre’s Notes on a Scandal is one of the most overrated films of last year. Hype springs eternal, yet the film’s pedigree is unarguably impressive: Based on the Booker Prize–shortlisted novel by Zoe Heller, with a screenplay by the playwright of Closer, Patrick Marber, under the direction of one of Britain’s leading theater directors. With all of that, and a cast headed by Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett — with Bill Nighy and Julia McKenzie thrown in for good measure — how could it so successfully fail?
The novel and film are presented as the notebook jottings of a woman named Barbara Covett. A state school history teacher nearing retirement in one of London’s lesser boroughs, Covett leads a life of quiet desperation. Hers is a Nordic isolation of lonely teas, solitary walks and a basement flat that’s as quiet (as Pasternak put it) “as paper.”
Notes on a Scandal

Directed by Richard Eyre
With Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett, Bill Nighy, Andrew Simpson and Julia McKenzie

Paper is her one solace, save for her cat. Covett details the minutiae of her days in a series of diaries that are only occasionally enlivened by the intrusion of fellow humans, though these episodes tend to be rather dramatic.
Covett is her own worst enemy. She’s a middle-class snob, equally contemptuous of both her betters and commoners. Her primary problem, though, is that she’s a deeply repressed lesbian. When her serried notebooks erupt in event, it’s usually after she’s met another woman.
Enter Bathsheba Hart, an art teacher who is taken on by Covett’s school. Hart’s casual bohemianism grates on Covett, yet the younger teacher is obviously beautiful and cultured. Covett is soon smitten. “Can she be the one?” she writes to herself after an afternoon in Hart’s company. The “one” what, though? Covett may not allow herself to know. Covett woos Hart, and it’s been a while since modern characters carried such trumpeting aptronyms: Covett by name and by nature. And Hart, we’ll find, has a tad too much heart.
Though far from miserable, Hart feels trapped in her marriage. An excellent mother, she’s spent the past 10 years tending her Down syndrome son, and so is feeling the need for a diversion. This will come in the form of a 15-year-old student, Steven Connolly, who seduces Hart into a criminal romance. The story’s tension arises when Covett finds that she’s been replaced in Hart’s affections by a lad. Her notebooks will again become horribly alive.
There’s much that could be made of this story with so many potent themes. But Marber and Eyre never bother to think seriously about the issues at hand, content instead to ladle out melodrama and histrionics.
The primary problem is with Covett herself, a character who can’t seem to develop even a semiconsistent psychology. She is coldly observant of emotional states (both hers and others) and yet swells into storms of the most aggressive self-pity. She plots her obsessive friendship with Hart dispassionately, while simultaneously applying gold-star stickers to memorable days, awash in a girlish crush. Were she a completely unreliable narrator, such as John Dowell in Ford Madox Ford’s great novel The Good Soldier, Notes on a Scandal could have made for a powerful psychological exploration of repression. Scandalously, its creators settled for less.
The acting is just that. Dench as Covett, Blanchett as Hart, and their support all have their moments (how could they not?), yet Eyre has directed them to be seen and heard to the topmost balcony. The entire project finally reaches its pat crescendo with the two leads dragged into a boxing divas round, a la MacLaine vs. Bancroft in The Turning Point or — perhaps a better analogy, considering Blanchett plays the scene bizarrely garbed and made-up like Siouxsie Sioux — Davis vs. Crawford in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
Perhaps the worst aspect of this tack is that Covett is transformed into a fright show’s goblin of lesbianism, the type of “dyke gone bad” one hoped had died with The Killing of Sister George and other pre-Stonewall fare. Hart even clubs Covett with that blunt word “vampire,” which is rich, coming from a middle-aged woman schtuping a teen. But the irony doesn’t seem conscious on Marber and Eyre’s part (or with film composer Philip Glass, who seems to believe that he’s scoring Browning’s Dracula again).
Nonetheless, the film has some curiosity value. It is terribly theatrical. If only it were thoughtful.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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