Everybody could use 'An Education'
It's 1961 and London is just a few years from swinging. But that's too long to wait for Jenny (Carey Mulligan), a precocious Twickenham teen in a hurry to soak up life and start doing adult things, preferably in France.
What she ends up with is "An Education," and with apologies to Flaubert, it's not particularly sentimental. But if you enjoy discovering bright new stars in the film firmament, it's still quite a treat.
Mulligan is a live wire from the moment Jenny and her cello are swept off their feet by an older stranger (Peter Sarsgaard) on a gloomy day. Playing a character whose voracious intelligence far outstrips her life experience, the 24-year-old actress hits perfect notes of vulnerability and ambition. She's caught between two worlds, and we're caught up with her.
At a certain age, say, 16, it's hard to tell when something is too good to be real. Sarsgaard's David is a smooth, seemingly sensitive charmer with money, taste, attractive friends (Dominic Cooper and Rosamund Pike) and personality to burn (his pick-up scene is a model of "How to Impress a Woman Without Appearing to Try").
Sure, his proclivity for fleecing rubes of their valuable art seems a bit shady, but how else would he pay for those romantic weekends in Paris, or those nights out on the town in London? As we learned at the end of "Some Like It Hot," nobody's perfect.
Directed by Lone Scherfig and adapted by Nick Hornby from Lynn Barber's memoir, "An Education" makes the seduction not just believable but fun, even as we fight the horror-movie urge to yell, "No! Don't go in there!"
The art deco clubs, the mod '60s fashions, the concertos and champagne: Jenny's fading dreams of attending Oxford don't stand a chance.
In a nice Gatsby-esque touch, the Jewish David claims to have studied at the Big O; Jenny's middle-class parents, played by Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour, are duly impressed even if they aren't big fans of the Jews.
If their only daughter can't go to university, she can at least marry a rich man. Only Jenny's sympathetic teacher (Olivia Williams) and stodgy headmistress (a dowdy Emma Thompson) see the writing on the wall, and Hornby makes Jenny's concisely lacerating "why bother?" putdowns of educational goals so convincing that we're tempted to side with her.
And that's why "An Education" works. It gives a glimmering surface sheen to the glamorous mirage of David's high life and all but asks, "Would you make a better choice?" (Though hardly a feminist tract, the film is a smart look at the limited expectations of and opportunities for women that lingered well into the '60s).
The denouement, as Jenny the Francophile would happily put it, isn't entirely satisfying; it arrives in a quiet explosion that belies the rest of the film's deft pacing.
But it barely matters. "An Education" engages throughout and flies by in the blink of an eye, or as long as it takes for a teenager to fall head over heels for a grand illusion.
‘An Education’
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Director: Lone Scherfig.
Starring: Peter Sarsgaard, Carey Mulligan, Emma Thompson, Jim Broadbent, Alfred Molina.
Rated: PG-13 for mature thematic material involving sexual content, and for smoking.
Run Time: 1 hr. 40 min.
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