Notes on a Scandal (Fox Searchlight, 12.27) is a sort of upscale, British-flavored Fatal Attraction minus the grand guignol… with a strong dose of sad-wicked lesbo suppression driving the engine. Skillfully adapted by playwright Patrick Marber (“Closer”) from a Zoe Heller novel called “What Was She Thinking?,” it’s easily one of the best written, best-acted potboilers of this type that I’ve ever seen — particularly when it comes to Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett‘s performance as a pair of schoolteachers caught up in each other’s obsessions and vulnerabilities in a manner that goes way beyond intense.
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Richard Eyre’s direction, Philip Glass‘s pulsating score (a perfect compliment to Dench’s obsessive emotional condition), the sense of restraint in Bill Nighy‘s performance as Blanchett’s much-older husband, and also in 17 year-old Andrew Simpson‘s as Blanchett’s teenaged lover. I worship the precisely-honed dialogue and particularly Dench’s voiceover narration (“she and I share an understanding of the quotidian awfulness of things”). I could easily see it another couple of times, just to savor the fusing of all the elements.
Anyway, I recorded some interview comments spoken by Blanchett, Nighy and Marber the other day, and have posted them in this order….
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