NOTES ON A SCANDAL (2006)

Writer Patrick Marber made his name when Mike Nichols filmed his play CLOSER/’04 as an expanded four-hander.  Like many a Nichols’ project, second-tier material sold as designer goods (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/closer-2005.html).  Here, Marber adapts a novel by Zoë Heller about a high school scandal, essentially a three-hander involving a controlling, but repressed, soon-to-retire lesbian-leaning teacher; a younger/married art teacher she’s set her eyes on; and the 15-yr-old student whose dick gets in the way of everyone’s plans.  Written as a mash-up of Terrence Rattigan  (career disappointment; ducked personal opportunities) and Tennessee Williams (curdled passion between the fatally mismatched), it’s a well-plotted l’amour fou³ that crashes in the light.  It might have worked if Marber had only told the team he’d written a pitch-black comedy of bad manners.  Over-produced, in a manner typical of Scott Rudin in his pre-exile Hollywood heyday; mistaking borrowed prestige for taste.*   With top-flight stage director Richard Eyre showing yet again his strange disinclination for movie rhythms; Judi Dench working too hard in a part her pal Maggie Smith was born to play*; and Cate Blanchette failing to convince herself (or us) that she doesn't see thru Dench’s entrapment scheme or that she’d fuck her student conquest rather than older husband Bill Nighy.  Not bloody likely.  Maybe this would all play more convincingly as a period piece.  1950s?  And with the coded dialogue of those censored days.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *It’s why Scooter has classical composer Philip Glass on the score.  His glacially slow cyclical cell adjustments not doing much for the film, but cowing the Academy to pony up with an Oscar® nom.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  *Maggie Smith devotees can get a taste of what she might have done here by watching a Double-Bill of one of her Best, and one of her Least known films: THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE/’67 and THE LONELY PASSION OF JUDITH HEARN/’87.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-prime-of-miss-jean-brodie-1969.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-lonely-passion-of-judith-hearne-1987.html