Luke
stu-kicks
CibbuanoAn Education
January 28th 2010 20:39
At a brisk self-contained 90 minutes, An Education is about one young lady's early introduction to the adult world and her subsequent navigation of the morally-grey minefield that come with the territory. As the double-meaning of the title bluntly suggests, it's a cautionary tale about learning the realities of life. In this case it pertains to the nouveau-sophisticate class that was beginning to emerge in early 60s Britain. These were upwardly mobile and educated young folk unburdened by the crushing drudgery of the class system or life during wartime, a new open-minded class fostered by the influence of European culture and opportunities suggested through the increasingly widespread advent of television. An Education is based on an autobiographical essay by Lynn Barber (who later turned it into a fully fledged memoir after novelist Nick Hornby adapted her story into the screenplay for this film) and is currently generating Oscar buzz for it's lead actress, Carey Mulligan.
Jenny (Mulligan) is an intelligent and cultured 16 year old of strikingly good taste and humour. Her father (Alfred Molina) is a strict taskmaster who aims to put her through university at Oxford. Within the first five minutes of An Education we're shown the typical path her life might take - the awkward teenage love interest, the ambitions tied in to a higher education, etc, etc. And then David (Peter Sarsgaard) appears, a smooth-talking Jewish man twice her age who connects with her through her love of music and art. Through David she finds herself fasttracked into the real world, experiencing jazz clubs and art auctions and visiting Oxford and Paris - it's a dazzling new world that would be hard for a brilliant young lady of her tastes to resist. It's quite clear when we first meet Jenny that she's already a bit beyond teenage boys and adolescence in general, but the title of the film looms prophetically over the narrative and we just know that wherever this story is heading it isn't all going to be beer and skittles.
The bulk of this film's success hinges on Carey Mulligan's performance as Jenny. She's positively radiant and has a star quality, like Audrey Hepburn reborn, only much more charming. She's been a pinup girl for Doctor Who fans for a good two or three years now from just a single appearance in one episode, and we'll find out in the space of a week if all her award ceremony nominations and wins were a good indication of notice from the Academy Awards this year. The character of Jenny could've come across as smarmy or precocious if put in the hands of a less charismatic actress, but Mulligan makes her impossibly likeable despite the character's faults and mistakes. You can't bottle that kind of talent or quality.
The underrated Peter Sarsgaard is perfectly cast as David too. He combines the character's gentlemanly qualities with a slight sense of creepiness that ensures we never quite forget the age difference between the two lead characters. Jenny might be a 16 year old played by a 24 year-old actress, but whenever the topic of sex comes up Sarsgaard makes it unsettling enough to ensure we never quite trust him in the way Jenny does. There's also some great supporting work from Alfred Molina, Emma Thompson and Olivia Williams as the wisened and not-so wisened adults trying to look out for Jenny despite her headstrong ideas.
An Education has more than a few interesting things to say about Jenny's coming of age and the mistakes she makes. Most of these kinds of movies feature the central character's childish worldview giving way to the inevitable realities that await them, but An Education bucks the trend by taking Jenny away from her lifeplan right from the start, and chucks her in the deep end. She might be prepared for all the finer things in life but it's her emotional immaturity that will trip her up. She comes to learn that her incredibly refined taste is also expensive to fulfil, with her thirst for knowledge a kind of addiction that needs financing. This dovetails in with her discoveries regarding how David is able to provide for her whims and desires... at first she's upset by his means of income, but she's also victim to the irresistable pull of all the culture she'd be denied if she stayed at home, and so - lacking independence - she finds it quite easy to compromise her values. Her resulting confrontations with her teacher and headmistress are two acidly sharp scenes that deconstruct the point of education itself and it's changing relevance in the early 60s, it's these scenes that really demonstrate Mulligan's quality as a performer and give us some of the film's most memorable and cutting dialogue ("This whole stupid country is bored" and "It's not enough to educate us any more... you've got to tell us why you're doing it").
I don't really have much more to say about this film other than that it's as fine a piece of art as the paintings and music Jenny adores so much. I'd also just like to mention how great Alfred Molina is in this too... he's quite the blustering, foot-down father type in the earlier scenes but it eventually transpires that he's not the typically cliched domineering dad you tend to get in this genre of film, he provides some much needed laughs throughout and his last few scenes brought a surprised tear to my eye.
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