- Helen Mirren, move on over: Judi Dench is about ten thousand times better in this movie than you were in The Queen. Holy crap. She’s the most frightening thing I’ve ever seen, for real. Her character, Barbara, is basically a really gruesome study of loneliness and she’s actually really rather tragic but it’s hard to sympathize with her because she’s such a raging psychopath. All of her narration comes in the form of entries she writes in her diary and they’re absolutely hysterical; this is actually a very funny film. She and Sheba (Cate Blanchett) play teachers in this movie and every time Barbara has what she perceives as a really great day with Sheba, she writes a glowing account of the day in her diary and then gives herself not one but sometimes six gold stars to congratulate herself. GOLD STARS! So, so awesome. She just tries so hard to get Sheba to grow fond of and then attached to her that you kind of really pity her (but you never can, not really); when Sheba invites her over for lunch, she goes out to get her hair done and buy some new clothes so that she looks nice without looking like she’s trying too hard and you just sort of shake your head.
- Cate Blanchett was also incredibly excellent. Sheba (short for Bathsheba, for real) is supposed to have come from a background with money and thus can afford to partake in what Barbara describes as various bourgeoise antics like dressing down to pretend she’s “one of us” with the plebes at her school or random traditions for family-wide dancing after lunch (I agree with Barbara on this one: WTF?). She’s also an art teacher, which means she’s already got a bit of flightiness to her that helps disguise whether or not she’s incredibly naive or just incredibly fucking stupid in thinking she can get away with her affair with her student.
- Bill Nighy was pretty good in support as Sheba’s much older husband, Richard. He gets several fairly hysterical lines, including one about being a semi-professional alcoholic. When Sheba finally confesses to Richard about her affair with her student — mostly because she has to after the student’s mother bursts into their home and gets into a brawl with Sheba, after which point it’s sort of hard to deny the story — she tries to get him to understand by using their own relationship as an example because he was her teacher while at university. He points out in a rather amusing fashion that this is exactly the point: she was twenty and an adult and this is how the older/younger type relationship has always worked for centuries and it works because they’re both consenting adults.
- I love how manipulative Steven, the student Sheba has the affair with, is. He gives her this sob story about how his father hits him and even though five seconds earlier she’s been trying to discourage the idea of them getting into a relationship, she immediately melts and tells him that if his dad hits him again, he should tell her. This is normally a good thing to suggest to a child who is being abused, I gather, but the way he delivered the line made it so painfully obvious that he wasn’t being hit at home, that he was just feeding her a line to get her to stay sympathetic towards him, and she’s completely taken in by it. [Which goes back to the "Is she naive or just plain stupid?" idea, especially considering she doesn't seem to note any sort of bodily harm on the boy when they have sex.] She later meets his father who is, of course, an all together unabusive, upstanding citizen of the world and she confronts Steven on this, to which he says something about how if he gave her that story he knew she’d go all Bob Geldof on her. Hahaha, Bob Geldof jokes for the win. [I do wonder what the odds are that this kid would actually know who Bob Geldof is, but I shall assume he does because it was an awesome joke.]
- I love the random twit who teaches with Barbara and Sheba who approaches Barbara and asks her if Sheba has ever mentioned him because he’s totally in love with Sheba. Barbara looks at him rather incredulously (since Sheba is married and everyone knows this) and then sarcastically says “Let me think… NO.”
- When Sheba’s teenage daughter finds out about her mother’s affair, she throws a fit and says “YOUR BOYFRIEND IS YOUNGER THAN MINE!!!” LMAO WIN.
- Cate/Judi fight sequence FTW. Seriously.
- Do British people smoke more than Americans, or are you just allowed to show average people smoking in British films more than you can in American films? There’s a scene where Sheba’s daughter, who can’t be more than fourteen, is sitting there smoking with Barbara.
Notes on a Scandal
Hilarious and fabulous.
IMDB Plot Synopsis A veteran high school teacher befriends a younger art teacher, who is having an affair with one of her 15-year-old students. However, her intentions with this new "friend" also go well beyond platonic friendship.