film | Diary of a mad white woman

If the American Film Institute compiles a list of the 100 creepiest movie characters, it's a safe bet that Dame Judi Dench's aggressively busybody history teacher from NOTES ON A SCANDAL will rank somewhere on there. Clinical shrinks might find a disturbing case study on pathological loneliness in this lady ... provided she ever opened up to anything other than her journal, where she cuts loose with pages and pages of scrawled self-pity and snobby, usually vitriolic observations about everybody else. Her latest fixation: Cate Blanchett as the new art teacher at her London comprehensive school. After Blanchett succumbs to the moony advances of a 15-year-old student (Andrew Simpson), Dench spies them in a sexual clinch, then essentially — and very delicately — coerces blanchett into an eerie companionship that recalls Matt Damon's psychosexual fancying of Jude Law in The Talented Mr. Ripley. Booned by the master-class talents of Dench and Blanchett, Scandal packs a dramatic punch with one of those deliciously diabolical thriller scenarios where there are no saints, sinners prey on the weaknesses of other sinners, and it's less a question of if it'll end badly for those involved than exactly how badly it's going to end.

Notes on a Scandal doesn't take the time to tap into Blanchett's head the way it does with Dench, and the reactions of Blanchett's jilted husband (the excellent Bill Nighy) — hateful towards Dench during a particularly tense moment, friendly to her in their next scene — occasionally feel like key bits of the movie were left on the floor of the editing suite, but these are sacrifices the movie might've made in order to whittle its source — Zoë Heller's 2003 novel, aptly titled What Was She Thinking? — down to a lean, mean 90 minutes. Alas, you forgive the missteps because it's riveting fun to watch Dench's maniacally parasitic repression and Blanchett's dewy boho vulnerability stir a tasty little bite of tabloid sensationalism into an engaging, high-class potboiler. Together, they make Notes on a Scandal scandalously good. B+