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Sex, Lies and Underage Boys:
Notes on a Scandal
by Christian De Matteo
HUGE
Finally, a movie that would
have given Alfred Hitchcock an erection. Notes on a
Scandal is engaging from start to finish, a wicked
thriller with a sense of humor, a dark tale that
doesn’t mind winking at you from the shadows and
snickering and elbowing you at inappropriate
moments.
The film is brilliant.
Unlike most examples of
American cinema, too politically correct and uptight
to view things in more than one black and white way,
Notes manages to take a story about an almost-40
female high school teacher who has sex with a 15
year old student not be about that. At no
point does the film feel any need apologize or
“message” you to death with how bad it is that she
did this, what an awful thing this is, or how
terrible it is to even conceive of such a notion.
The sex, in fact, is merely the vehicle by which the
story is told, a story of obsession, misplaced
fantasies and unrequited infatuation. This is the
story of people incapable of being happy with
anything but that which they can’t have, so shallow
that they are positive they are entitled to things
to which they have no right. The movie is about
class, class envy, un-analyzed politics and
selfishness. The film is a thriller in all the best
ways, creepy and fun, overwhelming but delicious, a
word I almost never use in movie reviews.
And the performances… high
heaven’s above, the performances. Watching the
stunningly beautiful Cate Blanchett act against the
astoundingly wonderful Dame Judi Dench absolutely
qualifies as fulfilling several of my personal movie
fantasies. And especially in such meaty roles. To
see the two develop this incredible and complex
relationship and take it through each of its natural
outgrowths is tremendous. The heart of the film are
the performances by these two incredible women, with
Bill Nighy’s husband character rounding out the
humanity in the movie perfectly.
The film is real, about real
temptations, real people and real situations. It
doesn’t pretend events can take place in human lives
that are too sordid to consider happening
regularly. It doesn’t apologize for showing
someone’s natural temptations as though they are the
only ones, it doesn’t demonize its characters.
Notes on a Scandal lets its characters demonize
themselves.
Which is where the fun comes
in. With this excellent cast, the wink and nudge of
the screenplay come to life with great depth and
clarity, never seeming hokey or overdone. Instead
the movie moves maliciously forward, celebrating
every single twist and turn it takes on the road to
abject depravity and utter distaste, all the while
giggling to itself about, as Shakespeare has already
so well said, what fools these mortals be.
Think Hitchcock’s Rope or
Shadow of a Doubt, movies about evil and perversion,
but neither, despite their wicked exterior, without
their giddy interior, their ability to tell a
harrowing, taut and mesmerizing story of thrills and
terror and still, with no intrusion to the rest of
the experience, nudge, nudge, wink, wink and say, as
another great orator, Bugs Bunny might, what a
maroon.
Through all this, Cate
Blanchett gives a brave, smoldering performance, not
afraid to let her sexuality pulse on screen against
her 15 year old counterpart (not the actor, the
character… this isn’t a Dakota Fanning flick).
Dench too drips sexuality, but hers is painfully
stifled, coming out, when it finally does, in
intense, overwhelming doses.
Notes on a Scandal is a tale of
shallow people of great depth, of characters so
desperate for their own needs and desires to be
fulfilled that everyone else’s desires are not
ignored because they can’t exist beyond their own.
No one is innocent, adult and child are the same,
all are bad and all are as lovable as errant tikes,
waiting to be swept back into our arms. This is why
I go to the movies. |
