Review of Notes on a Scandal (2006) by Markb. — 16 Feb 2007

Since Closer scribe Patrick Marber is typically so gleefully misanthropic about people in general and relationships in particular that he can make Neil LaBute look like Frank Capra in comparison, it's surprising that in Notes on a Scandal, adapted from Zoe Heller's novel, Marber actually manages to create two completely guileless, innocent on-screen characters! (Don't get too excited, though: they're Cate Blanchett's Down's-syndrome afflicted son and Judi Dench's cat.

) The key to enjoying Notes, a scalpel-sharp spider-and-the-fly tale about a veteran schoolteacher who emotionally manipulates and blackmails a colleague who's carrying on a sexual affair with an underage student, is to feel as pitiless toward the characters in this movie as Marber clearly does.

In the case of spinster schoolmarm Barbara Covett (Dench) this is a milk run: she's been compared to Glenn Close's iconic Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction in her relentless, psychotic pursuit to quench her social and sexual needs, but while it's possible to feel genuine pity for the pathetically lonely Alex (and if you watch Fatal Attraction outside of its original 1987 context, which equated her with the AIDS virus, you really should), Barbara on the other hand is so baldly contemptuous and utterly nasty about the person she selfishly desires and professes to love that sympathy for her is totally out of the question.

Don't feel too sorry for Blanchett's Sheba Hart either, though; she's attractive and appealing in a low-rent-but-trying-hard kind of way (Taxi's Louie DePalma would've described her as looking like a beautician) but in terms of her personal life and marriage tends to make mistakes in judgment so staggering that as 2006 movie characters go, only the Moroccan kids in Babel who decided not to use inanimate objects for target practice rival her in stupidity.

(And don't miss the fleetingly-mentioned but telling detail of how Sheba and her sad-sack husband got together in the first place.) Thanks in no small part to Dench's and Blanchett's terrific lead performances, equally strong support by Bill Nighy, Andrew Simpson and Juno Temple, flawlessly propulsive pacing by director Richard Eyre and an ingenious Philip Glass music score that not only heightens the escalating melodrama but at times satirically comments on it, watching Notes on a Scandal is like devouring a 1980s Aaron Spelling-produced nighttime serial with all the tastiness intact but none of the guilt.

However, Reelviews critic/originator James Bernardelli correctly called it on its disappointing climax which has a character discovering something that another character would be too smart to allow to happen; the old dramatic adage that states that if you've got a gun on the wall in Act One, you'd better fire it in Act Three is rendered somewhat ineffective here because the gun essentially FALLS OFF the wall.

The final couple of minutes are a bit too predictable to be really satisfying, but even here Marber's trademark stiletto dialogue, delivered by real pros, triumphs over all...virtually every line in Notes on a Scandal recalls Golden Age of Hollywood master Joseph L.

Manckiewicz (All About Eve, A Letter to Three Wives) at his finest, if Manckiewicz were by nature a major-league sadist and if he'd never had that pesky Hays Code to deal with.