No one gets shoved into a bookcase until the final act of Richard Eyre's spectacular, scintillating Notes on a Scandal, but the unbearable tension is palpable from the second Judi Dench purrs her first narrated words.
The venerable actress stars as Barbara Covett, a sour-faced, frumpy teacher at a London high school who interprets the shielded disgust of her colleagues as taciturn respect. Short and squat with hastily hidden gray roots, she still manages to look down her nose at everyone ' and has her eye out for the beautiful new art teacher, Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett).
Sheba has her hands full: She's raising two children with her much-older husband (the always reliable Bill Nighy) and her art students have the maturity of 5 year olds. As Sheba finds solace in a furtive, slowly forming friendship with Barbara, she also reaches out elsewhere: A sexual relationship with a 15-year-old student, which stays secret until Barbara peers through the art room window one night.
Scandal could proceed from this shocker with the relative ease of a Lifetime potboiler, Barbara using Sheba's secret as high-stakes blackmail to get whatever she wants. But playwright and screenwriter Patrick Marber, who wrote Mike Nichols' 2004 masterpiece Closer, makes it Barbara's opportunity to manipulate her friendship with Sheba, not destroy it.
Dench plays Barbara as a sad, pitiful woman with a hardened fa+
17 Archives
Matt Burns
200701313953midsize.jpg
Barbara (Judi Dench) confronts Sheba (Cate Blanchett) in Richard Eyre's 'Notes on a Scandal.' The thriller details Barbara's attempt to manipulate Sheba into leaving her family and entering a relationship with her using Sheba's secret sexual rel
