A Scandal, as Related by One Who Stands To Gain

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Normally, I don’t have much interest in the ways movies differ from the novels, plays, or memoirs on which they are based. A movie should be judged on its own terms and is not obligated to be faithful to its source. It’s got to change things no matter what, so it seems pointless to count the number of things it has changed.

Richard Eyre’s “Notes on a Scandal”is one of few movies that demand some comparison with their literary counterparts, in this case the novel “What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal,” by Zoe Heller. Unfortunately, the point where comparison could be most instructive is the ending, which is radically different in the book from what you will see in the movie but which the critic’s code of conduct forbids me to disclose.

What I can say is that your answer to the question of whether one of its two main characters, Barbara Covett (Dame Judi Dench), is a psychopath or just a very bad woman — or, perhaps, both or neither — is likely to be determined by whether you are talking of the Barbara of the novel or the Barbara of the movie.

Both novel and film are well made, and both seek to humanize Barbara, making her rather disturbingly likable in spite of the fact that she does a despicable thing. But they take quite different routes to the same destination.

The novel takes the form of Barbara’s diary, thus inviting our sympathy on account of the intimacy of our acquaintance with her interior world. It is a good illustration of the French proverb that to understand all is to forgive all. It also tells the story of the scandal in retrospect and more as a part of Barbara’s life story.

But the film can’t devote so much time to Barbara’s thoughts or stick so frighteningly to her point of view. It preserves some of the diary in the form of her narrative voice-overs as a plot device and as another indication of her obsessive personality, but its point of view is not only hers. Also, the film tells the story going forward, from beginning to end, and over a shorter period.

All its humanizing of Barbara comes out of the performance of Ms. Dench. And what a performance it is! Even so excellent an actress as Cate Blanchett, in the other main role, sometimes seems in danger of being marginalized.

Ms. Blanchett plays Sheba Hart, an art teacher in an inferior London comprehensive school who, though apparently happily married to the older Richard (Bill Nighy) and the mother of two children, has an affair with a 15-year-old pupil (Andrew Simpson). When Barbara finds out about it she uses the information subtly to blackmail Sheba.

What she wants, however, is not money but friendship. Or sex, if you prefer. Both the novel and the film leave the question of the sexual nature of Barbara’s interest in Sheba more or less up in the air, along with the question of her mental health, to which it is presumably related. But it is obvious that she wants something more than a girlfriend and confidante.

Now in her 60s, Barbara is terrified of growing old alone and dreams of breaking up Sheba’s family in order to make her a “companion” for herself. When Sheba confides in her, Barbara sees that she has been given the means to bring this about. All she has to do is betray her friend’s trust — which the law and professional ethics demand she do anyway — in such a way that Sheba doesn’t find out she’s done it.

The Barbara of the novel is a much more Machiavellian and impressive character. In an odd way, we have more sympathy for her because she understands so well what she is doing, whereas Ms. Dench’s Barbara is clearly more unhinged and so inclined to overplay her hand, making mistakes that her counterpart does not. This impression may owe partly to the long and apparently rational self-justifications of the diary-novel that are not available — or not so readily available — to the more bitter, less self-contained Barbara on the screen.

In the novel, for example, she expresses remorse for her betrayal, though in context her contrition looks like part of the elaborately contrived self-justificatory performance that the diary has become.

In both the novel and the movie, the scandal itself is incidental. Though utterly devastating to Sheba, it is for Barbara, who acts as our eyes and ears, merely a means to an end — and the only means possible for her ends. Only with an explosion of this magnitude can she hope to dislodge Sheba from her family.

Yet Patrick Marber’s screenplay imagines a very different Barbara from Ms. Heller’s. His Barbara does most of the same things as her prototype, but she wants one thing even more than she wants companionship: to have her pessimistic view of the world confirmed.

Beneath her self-pity, she is fiendishly proud of her own discernment of the evils that others take such pains to conceal. They give her a kind of permission for the evil in herself.

This is a more satisfying — and perhaps more pat — moral exemplum than anything Ms. Heller’s dark vision has to offer. Fans of the novel may resent the change in the ending as having been dictated by commercial considerations. But I wonder if it isn’t also, in some ways, truer to life.

jbowman@nysun.com


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