Notes on Notes

If I were a real reviewer, I’d have to give this film about English public school teachers at least a B+. It is well-filmed, even if the story is a bit pedestrian. It’s also superbly acted (but then again, with Dame Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett, that’s not really a surprise, is it?)

Essentially, Notes on a Scandal has a simple plot. Waiflike inheritee Blanchett decides to take a break from her much-older husband, her Downs Syndrome son, and her failed art career to teach art at a shoddy local public school. There she befriends an icy, old, lonely history teacher played by Dench.

And Blanchett also starts screwing a fifteen-year-old-boy.

Dench, the deeply lonely, psychotic old lesbian she is, finds out and then tries to manipulate the situation so that she can possess beautiful Blanchett forever, bwahahahaha.

And to link to the title and to the great climax, Dench also writes this all down in her diaries she’s been scribbling in for centuries instead of – oh I don’t know – living!

There are several reasons I don’t like films like these. No one is particularly likeable or admirable. If they’re not honorable, at least they could be clever or smart. I don’t mind flawed characters, but I hate characters that offer me no connection or interest whatsoever. They are unconsciously mean and stupid, and their seductions are – true to most life – embarrassingly clunky and dull.

And to top it off they’re a bit sociopathic. It’s like Freud’s Id times a million. They’re ego-centric to the point that it could seriously be considered a mental illness. Their thought patterns go something like this: “What I want, what I want, me, me, me, it’s all about me and my wants, and what I want and me, me, me, and there is no one else to consider, it’s just me, and my wants and me, and me, and me…”

In Little Children, at least these selfish people were witty, and their story was told with some humor, complexity, and panache. Notes on a Scandal I would see once, concede that it is brilliantly acted, and then hopefully forget all about it and never ever see it again.