Barbara actually has to stumble onto her protégée giving after-school ?attention to a self-confident, underage lout (Andrew Simpson) to realize that Sheba’s life is even weirder than it appears. “A gold-star day,” she writes of their teatime together. Sheba is a bit too bohemian for the older woman’s Thatcherite tastes, but things change when she manages to enjoy the company of her new friend’s messy family, which includes a son with Down syndrome and an older, possibly washed-up husband (Bill Nighy, marvellous as always). The bad math here mostly concerns new hire Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett), a novice art instructor whom our diarist takes under her spinsterly wing.
Director Richard Eyre, a Brit-TV veteran who previously handled Iris and Stage Beauty, has retained this epistolary quality by having Dame Judi Dench, as seemingly ?conservative schoolteacher Barbara Covett, read her own careful thoughts in voice-over while showing us actions that don’t really add up to the same thing at all. In fact, this tale of obsessive friendship and other polite transgressions is played for wickedly satisfying fun.Īlan Partridge writer Patrick Marber cleverly adapted this sharp screenplay from the Zoí« Heller novel of the same name, which is composed of florid diary entries. The frightful part comes from choosing material that could be disturbing, or at least sensational, in lesser hands. Rated 14A.Īs the English would say, Notes on a Scandal is frightfully good.
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