Notes on a Scandal
Richard Eyre (2006)
Judi Dench is superb but nearly all the rest of this screen version of Zoe Heller’s novel is overexplicit. The approach taken by Richard Eyre and Patrick Marber, who did the adaptation, is crystallised in Philip Glass’s score, which is too high-powered for the material. The serrate insistence of Glass’s music for The Hours was very effective in unifying the three parts of the story: here, the psychically charged vibrato of the theme is a tautology. One of the wonders of Judi Dench’s characterisation of the sixtyish spinster Barbara Covett, a history teacher in a North London comprehensive, is the way she expresses, through a drably unremarkable exterior, the sour dynamism of Barbara’s undernourished emotional life. (This is also a distinctive feature and strength of the Heller novel.) Dench doesn’t need Philip Glass to keep explaining there’s more to this dun-coloured woman than meets the eye.
The film did well at the box office[1] and the people who made it may well have been commercially right to reshape the novel in the way they did – but the choices they made are frustrating, given what the combined talents of Eyre, Marber and the cast might have achieved. The novel is written in the first person and that person is Barbara; as we grow more aware of her seething isolation, we also become less sure of her reliability as a narrator and this makes the storytelling both disorienting and engrossing. Eyre and Marber retain bits of voiceover for Barbara but with almost the opposite intention (or certainly the opposite effect): to give us our bearings. There’s no suggestion of any discrepancy between the world according to Barbara and reality. In fact, it’s the scenes in the picture which don’t involve Barbara, either as narrator or participant, that feel mechanical and lack authenticity, particularly those describing the scandal of the title, the sexual relationship between Bathsheba (Sheba) Hart, the new art teacher at Barbara’s school, and Steven Connolly, a fifteen-year-old pupil. Barbara is determined that the beautiful, willowy Sheba is ‘the one’ who’ll become the special friend she desires to fill her life. (Barbara’s surname is evidently symbolic.) It’s clear from the novel that she’s physically attracted to Sheba but the film coarsens and exaggerates Barbara’s homosexuality – turns her into a serial lesbian predator.
What’s done with three sequences that are particularly strong in the book seems to betray a lack of confidence on the part of the film-makers in the dramatic substance of the source material. When Sheba first invites her to Sunday lunch with the family, Barbara, for whom the invitation relieves the ‘white wastelands of … appointmentless weeks’ in her diary, has a traumatic time getting dressed up for the occasion and then making her way from a parking space two streets away to Sheba’s house. Her sandals begin to chafe and, by the time she’s seated herself in the Harts’ living room, ‘blood was trickling down my left ankle; the strap of my stupid shoe had bitten into the skin’. There’s a considerable tension here: Barbara doesn’t want the injury noticed and feels a fool – at the same time she’s on the receiving end of ministrations from the solicitous Sheba, who brings plasters and tissues. Eyre and Marber abbreviate Barbara’s build-up to the lunch and omit the bleeding episode entirely, replacing it with much less striking illustrations of social discomfiture. The other two sequences both concern Barbara’s terminally ill cat. In the novel, Portia has regular sessions of radiotherapy at the vet’s. After one of these, a despondent Barbara calls unannounced on Sheba, who’s anxious to end the meeting as quickly as possible since she’s expecting a call from Steven. In a later episode, the vet tells Barbara that it would be kinder to put Portia to sleep. Barbara takes her home for the night before the cat returns to the vet to be euthanised next day. Eyre and Marber have Barbara go appealing to Sheba for sympathy at both these points of crisis in Portia’s decline – and too nakedly. The first of the two scenes tries, clumsily, to cover far too much emotional ground: Barbara weeps about Portia, then makes a lesbian approach to Sheba, stroking her hands and arms, then loses her temper when she finds out that the affair with Steven, which Sheba had told her was over, is anything but. The second scene – when Barbara stands in the street, angrily begging Sheba to come with her to the vet instead of accompanying her family to watch Ben, Sheba’s Down’s syndrome son, in a school play – is crudely staged. The film completely loses the emotional complexity of the novel here. It’s worth quoting the passage extensively to give a sense of the lost opportunity:
‘On the way back to the flat I picked up some sausages and a half pint of cream at LoPrice, and when I got home I made a little bed of cushions and blankets in the kitchen so that Portia could lie comfortably and watch me while I cooked. I chopped the sausages into very small pieces and fried them in butter – an old treat. But all of this was more for my benefit than for Portia’s. It was obvious that she wasn’t well enough for an extravagant last supper. When I laid the sausages before her, she remained motionless, gazing at them dully. I watched her for a bit and then I bent down and picked her up. There was a pale murmur of displeasure here, but no struggle. I took her into the bedroom and tried sitting cross-legged on the bed with her in my lap. She wasn’t happy with this, so I let her arrange herself on the counterpane and then I curled myself around her, very gently scratching her under her chin. Her eyelids fell but did not quite close – her customary, slightly creepy expression of pleasure – and presently she began to purr.
Then, at last, I did cry. Although, because mourning – even for dumb animals – is never the focussed, unadulterated business we pretend it to be, my tears were only partly for Portia. Once the engine of grief was revved up, it began ranging, as grief tends to, about the crowded territory of my other discontents and regrets. …
It didn’t take very long. After about five minutes, the self-consciousness that preys on the lone weeper crept up on me. I began observing the rhythms of my sobs and the damp tracks that my tears had made in Portia’s fur. Shortly after that, my commitment to my own misery began to wane and I stopped being able to focus. In the end, I turned on the television and, for half an hour before I fell asleep, I watched the evening news, utterly dry-eyed.’
I wish Judi Dench had been given the chance to play that scene.
Notes on a Scandal nosedives in its last twenty minutes. There’s another scene – after Sheba’s liaison with Steven Connolly has been exposed – which Patrick Marber seems to have written as if working through a checklist of points to be made. The head teacher Sandy Pabblem fires Barbara on the grounds that (a) she concealed the fact that she knew about Sheba and the boy, (b) her approach to teaching is out of date, (c) Jennifer Dodd, her previous ‘special friend’ on the staff, threatened to take out an injunction against Barbara in the face of her harassing possessiveness, and the head seems virtually to threaten Barbara with blackmail so that she’ll resign. It’s possible that a better actor than Michael Maloney might have got some comedy out of the ineffectually smooth Pabblem’s scattershot accusations but it would be a tall order for anyone to make this work and I felt sorry for Maloney. As in Iris, Richard Eyre’s attempts to prove he’s directing a film rather than a play by injecting greater ‘cinematic’ activity into the proceedings are ham-fisted – especially the bit when Sheba, who’s staying with Barbara for a few days because her husband ‘needs time to think’ about what’s happened, discovers the diary that Barbara’s been writing. Yelling home truths at the older woman, Sheba then rushes out into the street, brandishing the diary, and giving herself up to a baying press mob.
The tying up of the story in the film is over-determined and the ending laughable. The lack of resolution of the novel is disturbing. We don’t know the outcome of the criminal proceedings against Sheba; at the end of the book, according to Barbara, they’re still holed up together and Barbara has everything under control and Sheba knows it makes sense. (It’s an important part of the subtext of Notes of a Scandal that Barbara is not only aware of her self-delusion but determined to sustain it by an act of will.) On screen, Sheba gets a prison sentence and Barbara goes in search of a new victim. She walks to the same bench on the top of Parliament Hill where she sat once with Sheba and previously, she tells us, with Jennifer Dodd and strikes up a conversation with a younger woman. Barbara can evidently tell just from seeing the back of her head that this is her next special friend and the woman is, inexplicably, putty in Barbara’s hands. In the course of this short coda, Richard Eyre manages to detract from one of the best moments in the early exchanges between Barbara and Sheba, when they sit with another teacher in a coffee shop and Barbara indicates silently to Sheba that she has a cappuccino moustache. (The blend of girlish amusement and the furtive thrill of a shared secret that Judi Dench gets into the look Barbara gives Sheba at this point is a marvel.) The corresponding moment with the new discovery, as she sits drinking coffee on the bench, isn’t just a tired reprise, it’s also poorly timed: Anne Marie Duff, in a thankless cameo, anticipates Barbara’s signal.
Most important, though, Richard Eyre and Patrick Marber overlook the significance of Barbara’s losing her job – and the fact that the workplace has been the only place where Barbara can get a bit closer to realising her fantasies of a special relationship: she can use her professional identity both to obscure such fantasies and as a position from which to nurture them. There’s a good moment when Barbara soaks in her bath, and tells us that:
‘People like Sheba think that they know what it’s like to be lonely. … They don’t know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the launderette or to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor’s hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin …’
Even though, as a reader, you don’t always believe Barbara, you believe this as the truth of her existence. Since Eyre and Marber largely ignore her unreliability anyway, it makes no sense for them to suggest that, uprooted from life at school, Barbara could simply start translating her needs into actions in the way that the last scene suggests. (Finishing work doesn’t, of course, matter so much in the book because Barbara reckons that she’s still got Sheba.)
Judi Dench is, as well as a great interpreter, a great incarnator. You watch Barbara breaking up a fight between Steven and another, more physically intimidating adolescent boy in Sheba’s art class and your first thought is: wouldn’t this short, dumpy, elderly woman be scared to step in like that? Then you realise, from the look in Dench’s eye and the set of her body, that Barbara’s contempt for the children in the school, reinforced by self-disgust, makes her fearless. In breaking up the art room fight, Barbara imitates Steven’s Northern Irish accent; later on her voiceover refers to him as Sheba’s ‘leprechaun’. (I don’t remember the book well enough to know how many of Barbara’s acidulous insights in the film Patrick Marber has invented: as he made clear in Closer, he does have an abundant facility for nasty wit.) Richard Eyre, however, seems squeamish about Barbara’s politically incorrect barbs. He might have allowed a little more of her fathomless sarcasm and borderline racism: even with the blessed Dame Judi in the role, few people are likely to see Barbara Covett as a role model.
Cate Blanchett does some brilliant things, especially with her long, slim body – the way she seems to unfold it, to suggest the impression that Sheba’s physicality is making on a boy like Steven and a woman like Barbara. Blanchett’s line readings are very witty but sometimes a shade too satirical – for example, in the moments when she reveals the shallowness of Sheba’s compassion towards Barbara. (Even Barbara would be hard put to ignore signals as clear as the ones Blanchett gives.) Bill Nighy is nuanced and convincing as Sheba’s shambling husband, except in the scene when he gives his adulterous wife a piece of his mind (another crude bit of direction). Andrew Simpson has a good coarse vitality as Steven and Phil Davis – as Brian Bangs (sic), perhaps the most unprepossessing member of the staffroom (and the competition is strong) – gives more sensitivity to the role than either the script or Zoe Heller supplies. In smaller parts as teachers, Joanna Scanlan and Tom Georgeson both register, as does Jill Baker as Blanchett’s chilly mother (although you don’t believe someone as hard-nosed as this would call their child Bathsheba).
12 September 2010
[1] According to Wikipedia, it was made for a budget of £15 million and grossed $49,752,391 worldwide.