Damaged goods: Why I wasn't scandalized by Notes on a Scandal

Someday, when virtual reality rules, cgi of Gollum in Lord of the Rings quality comes standard with CorelDraw, and every home has a Holodeck, I will be able to perform the experiment I want to perform every time I see a movie I didn’t like—make a “model” alternative version.

I’m not thinking recuts or mash-ups.  I mean I would like to remake Notes on a Scandal starring a middle-aged Glenda Jackson and a very young Vanessa Redgrave or a fifty-year old Vanessa Redgrave and Kate Winslet at her current age or a middle-aged Vanessa Redgrave and a very young Vanessa Redgrave.  Then I could see if the reason I think is the reason I didn’t like the movie as much as its leads’ performances deserved for it to be liked is the reason.

And that reason is that I think that, as good as they are, Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett at their current ages are fundamentally miscast.

Haven’t read Zoe Heller's novel, but that shouldn’t matter.  The most faithful movie adaptations of books still need to be movies that stand on their own without outside reference.  Judging by the script as I watched it played out, it seems to me that the parts call for an aging leading lady pitted against an ingenue still in her blooming, sensuous prime.

With Dench as the voyueristic repressed lesbian spinster, Barbara Covett, and Blanchett as Sheba Hart, the art teacher whose affair with one her students makes her the object of Barbara’s perverse desire to control instead of love, we have an elderly character actress and a leading lady just beginning to show the signs of the wear and tear of time.

Dench does an admirable job of attempting to play a 45 year old Glenda Jackson.  No way, though, that Blanchett can play a Kate Winslet.  They’re just too different in type.  Even though they aren’t that far apart in age, Winslet is still an ingenue.  Blanchett was born a leading lady.  She has always been grown-up beyond her years, possessing, or at least seeming to have access to, a wisdom that no one under the age of, say, 600 hundred has earned.  She doesn’t even seem quite human.  There’s something too ethereal about her.  Casting her as a several thousand years old elf queen in his Lord of the Rings movies, Peter Jackson was casting her perfectly to type.

Leaving aside the fact that Blanchett’s Sheba is too grown-up for Barbara—Barbara seems to target inexperienced and naive women who she can count on not to know their own minds, to be in doubt or denial about any latent lesbian tendencies, and who could therefore be more easily deceived.  In a way her choices for her “lovers” are as age inappropriate as Sheba’s choices (I’m including her husband, a man much too old for her at the time they married.  Normal boundries don’t exist for either women.)  Sheba as written falls into that category, but one look at a woman as mature and elegant as Blanchett and Barbara would know she stood no chance.  But Sheba’s name tells us that one look at her is all it takes—one glance at her biblical namesake, Bathsheba, was all it took to undo King David.

Bathsheba is one of the most famous objects of voyeurism in literature (along with Artemis, Susannah, and Lady Godiva.  Who am I missing?) and Barbara, the spy, is meant to be watching her all the time as if watching her in the bath.   But unlike Susannah, who also gets spied on while bathing, Bathsheba, as far as we know, is quite happy to have been watched.  Susannah is outraged at the elders.  Bathsheba marries David without an apparent qualm or complaint and doesn’t seem to even notice the absence of her late husband Uriah.

Sheba’s name, then, suggests that she is someone who expects to be an object of desire, and she appears to have left a string of Davids in her wake, men who have thrown aside all they hold dear and gone against their better natures in order to possess her, her husband being the most important in her life, sacrificing his first wife and family for her.  But her father may have been her first David. I don’t think we’re meant to infer actual incest in their relationship, but given her mother’s obvious anger at her, we can guess that early in her life Sheba’s father began preferring her company to his wife’s and that Sheba liked this and encouraged it.

So there’s a suggestion of exhibitionism in her name too.  She should be one of those women who seem to be undressing even when they’re simply walking across the lunch room.  Blanchett does not have that kind of overtly physical sensuality. 

But Sheba is also an emotional and psychological exhibitionist.  She doesn’t pay attention to boundries in casual conversation with near strangers any more than she pays attention to them in her physical relationships.  Blanchett handles this side of Sheba beautifully.  Telling Barbara all about herself, she is utterly careless in a way that at first suggests confidence and then quickly shows itself to be utter carelessness and narcissism.  But without the physical carelessness and vanity to go with it, Blanchett’s emotional nakedness comes across as simple ditziness.  She’s just chattering, a garden variety neurotic who has no other topic of conversation except herself.  It’s hard to see how Barbara, even considering how much she wants to believe that Sheba is truly offering herself, would be fooled into thinking she could count on this woman to join her in her secret, separate world.

Sheba should be a palpable physical force, to herself as well as to sensible people around her.  She should be as carried away by the power of her own body as they are by the sight of it.  She is heedless, a butterfly.  She is what she wants.  In this case she is like a butterfly who, flying at top speed at a flower she’s decided she must drink from, zooms straight into a spider’s web in the way and then decides, at least temporarily, that the spider coming down to devour her doesn’t look that bad.

This is why partly why I think Dench is miscast.  There isn’t enough erotic charge left in her to draw Sheba’s body towards her.  Sheba should be reacting seductively to Barbara’s advances.  Sheba has mommy issues, but Dench, even when she lets her severely spinsterish guard down and tries to get cuddly, is a little too grandmotherly to be bringing those out.

Meanwhile, Blanchett, who can be very sexy, in a grown-up, directed, healthy way—with her it’s a case of mind over matter.  She can turn it on or off as if with a switch, which is what made her the right choice to play Katherine Hepburn in Scorsese’s The Aviator—is not convincing as a character driven by her instincts and desires, either physical or psychological, at the mercy of her body or her id or her heart.

So when her husband begs to know why she has destroyed their lives by sleeping with one of her students and she has to say, “I don’t know,” we don’t believe her.  A woman like her must know.  She’s too smart, too cool, to self-controlled to have taken herself by surprise to that degree—unless there’s underlying psychological damage that gets in the way of self-knowledge.

This means that Blanchett’s performance invites psychoanalysis.  Her Sheba becomes a case study to be analyzed and explained away.  Instead of being symbollic of the fact that we are all too often at the mercy of our bodies, which is to say, we are often out of our own control, she’s merely a familiar type, a common neurotic we can distance ourselves from by “understanding.”

Oh, I see!  She took her older husband away from his first wife as a way of working out her own Elektra complex and getting back at her terrible, emotionally abusive mother.

Oh, I see!  She goes after a boy her daughter’s age as a way of punishing her younger self for coming between her mother and her father.  She’d have gone after her daughter’s boyfriend if she had the nerve or the chance.  She doesn’t and didn’t, so she steals him at one remove, making her student a stand-in for the fifteen year old she really wants.

She is just damaged goods.  Which makes Barbara’s thinking of her as a potential soulmate even more delusional.  Barbara wants to keep her “lovers” the way she keeps her cat.  She wants the sense of control without her pet’s insisting on a personality of her own.  Cats keep their secrets.  Blanchett’s Sheba is a dog.  She demands to be known as herself and because of her neuroses—neurotics are people who are too much themselves to themselves all the time—she can be known.  The stray Barbara picks up at the end of the movie is a fairly blank sort of person.  Barbara will be able to write herself onto this young woman the way she writes herself into her notebooks.  She can’t do that with Sheba, it turns out, but as it is she can’t do it not because Sheba realizes too late what Barbara is and what she herself has thrown away, but because Sheba is already over-written.

Cross-posted at newcritcs.

Comments

[Kevin Wolf]

I enjoyed this movie, primarily for the acting, though it hasn't stuck with me in the way of a great, or even very very good, movie. And I agree that it may be due to the casting.

But I wonder about some of your comments, such as that Sheba is too controlled -- but at the same time she's chatty and indiscriminate. Maybe I'm misunderstanding.

Certainly, it's not the great drama it might have been and the appeal instead becomes watching fine actors put life into a pretty basic story about marital infidelity, with Barbara's motivations and manipulations as an extra element adding a thriller aspect to the movie.

[harry near indy]

Even though they aren’t that far apart in age, Winslet is still an ingenue. Blanchett was born a leading lady.

true that, lance.

btw, when i read the word ingenue, i was reminded of renee zellwiger. anybody else?

[cali dem]

I think it was a poorly written screen play at fault. The part of the film near the end when Blanchett's character went nutty and put on all the eye make up was just plain stupid. The only reason I watched the film at all were the performances by the lead actresses.