I guess the simple thing would be to call An Education a coming-of age tale set in early 1960’s England. But, I don’t think there’s a simple thing in or about this movie.
Helen, a character we’re introduced to fairly early in the film (played brilliantly by Rosamund Pike, redeeming herself for that gawdawful Surrogates movie), and off the bat we know she’s dense. Not out and out dumb, I guess, but she just seems to be living on a different plane of existence than anyone else, and not a higher one I should say. There are huge portions of this film where I can too easily identify with that.
There’s a lot of this movie I don’t understand, but not because it’s written or directed poorly, it’s because I’m either A.) Not smart enough, or B.) Not British. There’s a five minute conversation about going to an auction house and buying paintings. I didn’t understand any of it until they went to the auction house and saw the paintings. And that’s the only negative thing I can say about An Education. It makes me wish I was smarter and British.
Based on a memoir of the same name, written by Lynn Barber and adapted by Nick Hornby (About a Boy), it was directed by Lone Scherfig (her first English-speaking film I believe). It’s the story of a wise-beyond-her-years 16 year old Jenny, a cello player who speaks French, smokes cigarettes and struggles with Latin. Pushed by her father, her sole purpose in life is to get into Oxford University until she meets a man almost twice her age, David.
That’s where the movie probably gets dicey for some people. I’m not sure they ever give David an age, but he’s easily in his late twenties. And, for the sake of anyone who hasn’t seen the movie I’m not going to go further into the plot than that, because, really, anything else would just ruin the film. That might make talking about it a bit difficult, but I’m gonna give it a go anyway.
With the exception of a few bits of language and one kind of racy scene (it’s honestly pretty tame) this movie could have easily played alongside Roman Holiday as a double feature in the late 50’s/early 60’s. In fact, you could almost mistake Carey Mulligan (she plays Jenny) for Audrey Hepburn here. Not that she’s doing any kind of imitation, just that it’s rare to see anyone with that kind of grace and class on screen anymore, especially at such a young age.
Peter Sarsgaard plays David, a “wandering Jew” as Jenny calls him, mocking her father. You can always sense something underneath the surface of his character, and from the first moment you meet him you’re waiting for the wolf to pounce, for the bad to come out, and it does, but just not in the way you think. And that’s probably the most brilliant thing about this movie, it never goes where you think it’s going to go.
Not that it’s a mystery, nothing needs to be solved. It’s life, and life has a way of throwing things at you when you least expect it. Sometimes they’re great and sometimes they completely derail you. There’s a lot of both here.
While Jenny and David are the focal point, the entire film is about the relationships Jenny has formed in her short life. Besides David the most important are with her father, a man who seems to only want her out of the house (albiet well taken care of on top of it) and her teachers, women complacent with their situation in life. Jenny sees them as obstacles she must overcome to gain her freedom, and until David comes along her only means of hurdling them is through her studies. Knowing that David is able to give her a life and an identity outside of these things, it’s hard to fault her for falling in love with him. Or, at least in love with the idea of him. She sees a man that embodies everything her father isn’t, someone who doesn’t tell her what she can’t do, but endulges her in the things she can.
Alfred Molina is fantastic as Jenny’s father. Equal parts overbearing and loveable. There are scenes where you want to just yell at the screen for the way he’s treated his daughter. Cara Seymour plays her mother. Like Sarsgaard as David, you can see something just behind her eyes in this performance. She’s very quiet, but there are a few scenes where you can see she’s just about to lose her patience with Molina. It’s something I really hoped we’d get, but, no. Which, I suppose is more true to life. And, if this film is anything, it’s true to life.
