You know this already, but Cate Blanchett will soon be reminding you: She can do anything. In films that arrive this winter, she plays women with secret lives, and the two roles are mirror images. In Notes on a Scandal, she is an honorable mother led, with carnal enthusiasm, toward dishonor. In The Good German, she is a prostitute whose vices hide her virtue.
A 15-year-old hooligan is hot for teacher in Notes, and Blanchett's Sheba Hart returns the ardor. The schoolroom sex scenes are hyper and biological, and Blanchett avoids playing the dumb strumpet that the Today show spotlights whenever a real-life teacher gets extracurricular with a student. Yes, director Richard Eyre (Iris, Stage Beauty) benefits from that same queasy titillation of pedagogy turning into pedophilia, but Blanchett makes Sheba compellingly wounded, desperate for a release from domestic difficulties—her son is mentally disabled; her husband (Bill Nighy) is a generation older—and in need of the same nurturing that she offers in her job and her household. Her bad behavior drops her into a spinster's web, but the tut-tutting protector in the teacher's lounge (Judi Dench) has neglected desires of her own. The scandal unites and then divides the two women, and even in full meltdown Blanchett electrifies.
In Steven Soderbergh's The Good German, Blanchett smolders as Lena Brandt, a Berlin barroom slattern who in the immediate aftermath of World War II sides with a G.I., but Tully (Tobey Maguire) turns out to be a baby-faced sociopath operating a sizable piece of the black market. Tully uses Lena for her body and she uses him for the forged papers that could free her—and some mysterious others. Lena has divided loyalties, just like the German capital whose spoils are being reapportioned among the Allies. George Clooney, as a sleuthing journalist (and Lena's ex), struggles to divine the motives of the victors; the Communists and the capitalists are as distrustful as ever, searching for the Third Reich's scientific brain trust, now gone to ground. The enjoyment is in deciphering all the allusions: Soderbergh hails The Third Man and Casablanca, while Blanchett evokes Garbo, Dietrich, and Bergman, in darker shades than her sunny Hepburn in The Aviator. Not only is she in good company with these tributes, she's among her equals.—NED MARTEL
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