Out of Her Head

Actually, Dench's character, Barbara Covett, has more than a little in common with Tolkien's greedy, misshapen man-thing, as her name not-so-subtly suggests. What Barbara covets is the new art instructor at the school where she teaches, a vivacious young woman who goes by the equally suggestive name of Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett, also up for an Oscar). Despite their age difference and diametrically opposed personalities, Barbara and Sheba quickly become fast friends—although Dench, by virtue of appearing onscreen, must signal to us the lascivious designs that Barbara's diary entries so carefully repress. When Barbara catches Sheba performing extracurricular gymnastics with one of her teenage students (Andrew Simpson), however, jealousy and anger threaten to open ruinous cracks in her brittle, haughty façade. For Sheba, of course, what's at stake is not just her marriage (Bill Nighy plays her affable husband), but her freedom, since any whiff of the affair might lead to criminal prosecution.

Given that it's essentially a tony lesbian-stalker film, Notes on a Scandal generates surprisingly little heat. In part, that's because Blanchett, terrific as she generally is, lacks the reckless abandon her role demands. (Sorry, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. You should have nominated Emily Blunt for The Devil Wears Prada instead.) As the counterpoint to Barbara's withered yearning, Sheba needs to be wanton and sensuous, and Blanchett has always been very guarded when it comes to sex—not only by refusing to do nude scenes, but by keeping torrid passion at arm's length. Marber's screenplay (via Barbara's diary) informs us that the entire school falls at Sheba's feet the moment she enters its halls, but we see nothing especially alluring—certainly nothing that would inspire a woman like Barbara to risk her self-possession and dignity. Consequently, the film's heated climax, in which the two women practically engage in female mud wrestling, just seems kind of silly. On the Richter scale of depraved transgressions, this one barely registers as a 2.0 tremor.

Still, the real problem here is that the film never burrows deep enough inside Barbara's deranged mind. Its voiceover passages offer a hint of what we're missing; you can sense the perverse pleasure a reader might get from hundreds of pages spent trapped in this bizarre woman's company. When the movie leaves Barbara behind—for example, to spy on Sheba and her boy toy in one of their unconvincing clinches—it immediately loses whatever vague atmosphere of menace it's managed to cobble together. And while Dench does her usual no-nonsense job—the role isn't so much a change of pace for her as it is a distillation of the qualities that have made her memorable as queens and dowagers—only a performance for the ages could have achieved the necessary alchemy. Anthony Hopkins managed it in the Merchant-Ivory version of The Remains of the Day, brilliantly internalizing Kazuo Ishiguro's immaculate prose so that every stray thought is somehow transparent. But if your film requires that kind of genius to succeed, good luck to you.