How To Covett A Hart: An Unsettling Love
Match Between Mother Superior, Hester Prynne and the Fatal Attraction Diaries
PopcornReel.com Movie Review: "Notes On A
Scandal"
By Omar P.L. Moore/December 19, 2006 -- published on December 21, 2006
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Here's a true story:
earlier this year at a music festival during its closing song, a woman who
looked to be in her
fifties pleaded and begged the way one without a home would plead and beg for
food. "Please dance with me, please!", she pleaded and repeated in a
sad, desperate voice, over and over, as she moved from person to person
within a large crowd asking just about every man she set her eyes upon. Some
mocked her, others made faces at each other. Still others laughed in her
face as she pleaded. After about three minutes a man who appeared significantly
her junior obliged her. The look of happiness and peace on the woman's face
was priceless.
"Notes On A Scandal" might be about what happens when a woman in the scenario above
does not get the dance that she asks for. In this case it's Barbara Covett (Judi Dench)
who is without a dance partner. Early on she sees a
potential tango opportunity however while in the home of the Hart family.
Home is where the heart is and Sheba Hart is the dancer -- Elton John's "Tiny
Dancer" if you will, the flirty "ballerina girl, you must have seen her,
dancing in the sand" (we can't miss Sheba -- she is so alluring and highly
appealing.) Sheba, her husband Richard (Bill Nighy) and son Ben (Max Smith),
born with Down's Syndrome, are dancing to some reggae. Barbara
tentatively joins in and is as awkward as ever. Her two left feet mean
that she doesn't fit into their fun-loving, warm, idyllic home at all.
Soon after however, Barbara dances very fluidly -- in her own mind.
The psychological wheels turn in Richard Eyre's film, which features its most
complex and highly unreliable narrator. Barbara is quick to judgment in
her heart and her diaries, but reserved and contained within her soul -- this
restraint is designed to mask the brooding undercurrent of loneliness, yearning
and desperation that boils within her -- and Judi Dench plays the character
superbly. Without having had the benefit of interviewing Zoe Heller --
whose book "What Was She Thinking?" was adapted by Patrick Marber ("Closer")
into Mr. Eyre's film -- it is difficult to know for sure whether the naming of
her characters Barbara Covett (to covet) and Sheba Hart (heart, of the African
Queen of Sheba -- a glamorous and profoundly beautiful queen in ancient African
history who some in England still today refer to in everyday sayings*) -- are
deliberate or just happy accidents. Based on watching the film "Notes On A
Scandal", which opens on Wednesday, December 27 in select U.S. and Canadian
cities before expanding to countries near and far in 2007 -- it would appear
that Ms. Heller's naming of the characters is more than a coincidence.
Be that as it may, the film -- set in London and shot in alternate tones of
bright, pale whites and grays and golden oranges and reds by Chris Menges -- is
a remarkably ordinary event in total -- but this is all the better to juxtapose
the familial consternation that inevitably occurs when Sheba decides to scratch
an itch that your mother told you wasn't good to do. The danger you
remember from childhood, is that you wouldn't be able to stop, that the skin
would break and get infected.
Similarly, the family Hart is ravaged by an affair that infects not just them
but the townsfolk and the tabloid media -- which in this film is wisely reduced
to a few frenzied camera shots of the circus -- and perhaps to resist any
parallels to Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau, a mid-30's teacher and
13-year-old student respectively who are now both older and a married couple and
who were scrutinized a decade ago for their unlawful sexual trysts that occurred
in the Seattle, Washington area of the U.S.
But Patrick Marber, who once again demonstrates his strong ability to write
painfully complex characters mired in complex affairs of the heart, resists a
potential gimmickry that could have stopped the screenplay cold. Another
writer might have glossed up the affair that Sheba has with her 15-year-old
pupil Steven Connolly (Andrew Simpson), but Mr. Marber writes it with a detached
eye. Mr. Eyre directs the mismatched couple's sex scenes as if a fly on
the wall, yet we as an audience never feel as if we are violating someone's
sanctity. After all, if the sex Sheba has with Steven is statutory rape or
molestation, where is the sanctity to be found in that? What we see
of the sex is less an event than a curiosity that Sheba herself has longed to
see play out, even as Richard remains as dutiful and supportive of her as ever.
While the affair happens it is far from the centerpiece of "Notes". In
fact the scarlet letter "A" which you might expect to see figuratively if not
literally, is never raised as a legitimate calling card beyond the obvious
objections of Steven's parents. There is no lynch mob community waiting
outside the Hart's door, only perhaps, Steven himself.
"Notes On A Scandal" is most compelling and riveting when Ms. Dench and Ms.
Blanchett do their dance on screen together -- their acting, that is.
Their performances are of the highest order and when one or both of them
are not on screen, the film slows to a bit of a crawl. Thankfully however,
neither of them is away too long. That's to take nothing away from the
strong talent of Bill Nighy. In his few moments on screen he casts a
sympathetic Richard unaware of the trouble that brews within his home.
Marber's script leads to a showdown which does not, contrary to the "Fatal
Attraction" reference in the title of this review, end in violence. The
reference to the Michael Douglas-Glenn Close film -- which will be 20 years old
next September -- is to two scenes occurring at opposite ends of the film in
symmetrical fashion: when Sheba gets cream from a Danish or donut she eats on
her nose and upper lip, and Barbara points it out to a smiling Sheba, as she
does to another woman before the film's end. Glenn Close did the very same
to Mr. Douglas and he wasn't quite the same after that in Adrian Lyne's film.
"Notes" swells to a crescendo thanks to the brilliant composer Philip Glass and
his swirling score, which enraptures the audience into the maelstrom that these
two lonely souls separated by a generation have placed themselves in.
Diaries are about as secret as they can be, but revelations can be even more
powerful. There is some crackling dialogue from Mr. Marber's script in the
film's climax spoken specifically by Ms. Blanchett's Sheba where she references
"Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?" It's an appropriate reference, for not
only is "Notes From A Scandal" unafraid to tackle some unsettling themes, it
stands up very favorably to the test, too.
Copyright 2006. PopcornReel.com. All Rights Reserved.
As stated in this review, "Notes On A Scandal" opens in select U.S. and
Canada locations on Wednesday. The film, rated R by the Motion Picture
Association of America for language and some aberrant sexual behavior, is a
quick 95 minutes in length and seems quicker. *-- The expression that can
still sometimes by heard in England, particularly in its London capital -- is,
"who do you think you are, the Queen of Sheba?"
(Photo of Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench: Fox Searchlight/DNA Films)