An Education
Based on Lynn Barber’s memoir, An Education plays out rather like a diary read. When you write of exciting moments in your life, you don’t need to elaborate on certain things, like best friends’ names or schoolwork, and this film doesn’t bother to either. Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is a schoolgirl, almost but not quite of age, who falls into a relationship with David, an older man (Peter Sarsgaard). It’s more than that, of course. Her education at school suffers at the hands of the education in life she receives from David – but also she learns about the importance of both for women in 1961, when it was “a waste” for a marriageable woman to go to university – what would she use her education for? Jenny is a model student being pushed by her reclusive, narrow father (terrifically portrayed by Alfred Molina) to get into Oxford. Her book education is vast – she can speak of paintings she has never seen, speak the languages of countries she has never visited, and read novels about lives neither she nor her parents ever live. Molina is a puckered, tight-fisted near-agoraphobe and has trapped Jenny’s mother (Cara Seymour) in his web of fear and rigidity. It’s a wonder Jenny didn’t rebel sooner.
Enter, oh so casually, Peter Sarsgaard, a man genetically engineered for the role of David. Sarsgaard is both non-threatening and feral – he’s got a boyish face with impish laugh-lines well set into his charming face. He’s too sweet, too smooth, such that the wise old woman sitting in my seat didn’t trust him for a millisecond. He seduces her parents into a foggy state of permissiveness that could only take root in a home so sheltered from life. David continually comes up with new sides to his character, shady and sunny. He’s never predatory, always generous, but one still has to wonder, why a girl so young? Mulligan would tempt any man to be sure – she’s beautiful and sparkly, and can hold forth on all her book-learning better than the more uncultured adults in David’s life (particularly Rosamund Pike). It was hard to watch Jenny fall so easily to chaotic neutral David, but it was deliriously romantic as well. He wears down our resistance and we fall for him too.
Balancing Jenny’s tumultuous emotional education are the pillars of her academic one, teacher Olivia Williams and headmistress Emma Thompson. What Jenny sees when she looks at these women, contrasted with her world with Sarsgaard and Pike and Dominic Cooper, is pointless drudgery. Screenwriter Nick Hornby is an old hand at writing stories about men finding their sea legs in life and taking off the blinders that keep them single-minded precluding all else (Fever Pitch, About A Boy, High Fidelity). It’s lovely to see that he can translate his narrative skills and insight to a female’s perspective. The diary feel is all the more a triumph for having been translated through a man.
The production is gorgeous, from the lush elegance of the grown-up world to the chalky stultification of the classroom. The soundtrack is pretty, the costumes are dashing (even before Mad Men this has always been my favorite sartorial period). An Education is deliciously shot by John De Norman (check out his filmography to be impressed). Jenny grows wiser – and wisdom comes from life, not books. She receives an education, and through Barber’s memoir, seeks to educate us – not on the follies of her youth, but the importance of life teaching and knowing why we learn what we learn. It’s great, check it out.
MPAA Rating PG-13
Release date 10/9/09
Time in minutes 100
Director Lone Scherfig
Studio Sony Pictures Classics
