Notes on a Scandal

Barbara Covett (Judi Dench) has taught history at a north London comprehensive for longer than anyone on the staff can remember, and she keeps a diary in which good days get a gold star and colleagues get a sentence they would not survive. When Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett) arrives to teach art, Barbara decides she has found a friend. Sheba has found something else: a fifteen-year-old pupil, Steven Connolly (Andrew Simpson). Richard Eyre’s film, adapted by Patrick Marber from Zoë Heller’s novel, is about what Barbara does once she knows. It is a sharp, unkind, well-made 92 minutes, worth your evening, with one loud reservation.

The narration is the film. Marber gives Barbara a diary voice of patient, precise spite, and Dench reads it as if dictating to a secretary she does not trust. Sue Hodge (Joanna Scanlan) is dismissed in a clause; the headmaster, Sandy Pabblem (Michael Maloney), gets a paragraph. We laughed at nearly all of it, and then noticed we had been agreeing with Barbara for twenty minutes, and that the film had meant us to. On screen Dench does less and it carries further: a hand laid on Sheba’s arm and left there a beat too long, the sag in her shoulders when she gets home to the cat.

Blanchett has the harder job, because Sheba must be a fool without being a cartoon. She plays her as a woman who drifted: married young to Richard (Bill Nighy), a good deal older, mother to a furious teenager, Polly (Juno Temple), and a son, Ben (Max Lewis), who has Down’s syndrome, and now back at work and mistaking a boy’s attention for being seen. Simpson’s Connolly is cocky on the football pitch, needy in the art room, a child whenever it suits him. The film does not excuse Sheba. It lets Barbara judge her in voice-over and then spends an hour showing us what Barbara’s judgment is worth.

Nighy is the quiet surprise. For most of the film Richard is fond, faintly patronising and funny, a man used to being the clever one in the house. Then, in the second half, he has a scene we will not describe, except to say that we flinched, and that we had not known he had it in him. Tim Hatley designs the two homes so that each tells you about its owner before anyone speaks: the Harts’ house is books, rugs, clutter and a pottery studio down the garden; Barbara’s flat is beige, tidy and full of nothing. Hatley also dresses them, Barbara in brown and grey, Sheba in long skirts and loose jumpers.

Chris Menges shoots a London of low winter light, grey skies over the playground and strip lighting in the corridors, and keeps the camera close on Dench so that we watch her watching Sheba. Then there is the score. Philip Glass has written churning, repeating strings that treat a cup of tea in the staff room as if it were a bank raid. For half an hour this works, because it tells us Barbara’s mind never stops. After that it keeps going at the same pitch through scenes that needed quiet, and we started hearing the music instead of the people. John Bloom and Antonia Van Drimmelen cut briskly, a virtue for an hour and a problem in the last twenty minutes, when events the novel let breathe arrive one on top of another.

Heller’s book was a comedy about loneliness with a thriller underneath. Marber has turned it the other way up, and mostly the trade pays: the film is tighter and more frightening than the novel. The cost comes at the end, where a story about small daily cruelties, the kind that happen in any staff room, becomes a story about a monster, complete with a confrontation shot and scored like the close of an opera. Dench keeps Barbara a person through all of it, lonely and ashamed and still hoping to be liked. The film around her is less careful.

It carries a 15 and runs an hour and a half, which makes it a good film for a weeknight: on before the news and done before you are tired. See it for Dench, who is as good here as we have seen her, and for Nighy’s one scene. Turn the strings down a notch if you can. The people are saying things worth hearing underneath them.