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An Education

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

I wish I didn't know going into An Education that Carey Mulligan, who stars as sixteen-year-old Jenny, was twenty-three when she filmed the role. Because Jenny seems about that age sometimes: she's precocious, independent, quick-witted, and fiercely intelligent. Knowing that she seems like she's in her twenties because she actually is ruined the illusion.

But am I supposed to penalize Mulligan for that? She plays Jenny rather fearlessly: as an all-too-fallible human, someone who has the capacity to be really mean sometimes, and really stupid other times -- to the point where you really want to wring her neck because of how stupid she's being for such a smart girl. I wouldn't recommend this movie to fathers of pre-pubescent girls, because they'll likely rush home and lock their daughters in their rooms until they're twenty-one.

The plot of the movie is quite simple: Jenny's a middle-class girl in an all-girls' school in early 1960s London, working hard to get a scholarship to Oxford. When she meets David (Peter Sarsgaard), a much older man (though it's unspecified, he's in his thirties), and his glamorous friends (Dominic Cooper and Rosamund Pike) she starts to wonder why she's been working so hard to devote herself to such a comparatively boring life.

We know her relationship with David is not wise. Aside from the age difference, there's the way he effortlessly charms everyone, the way he manipulates her parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour) into allowing her to spend more time with him at the level of an experienced con man. She herself recognizes a few red flags. But the life offers excitement and glamour, and David is a man, not an awkward schoolboy. And he offers to take her to classical music! And Paris!

The gist of this story is not hard to figure out. The pleasures of the movie are in its details. The way David seems to plan out entire conversations ahead of time. (Sarsgaard has the character nailed, if not the British accent.) The way Jenny's mother understands her in ways her father, despite his obvious love for her, is oblivious to. I especially liked how Jenny at one point explains that she has long decided she will lose her virginity on her seventeenth birthday. Someone points out to her that she'll likely be with David at the time. "Oh golly, it will be with David, won't it?" She's doing it entirely for herself -- the male involved is irrelevant.

I found one of the most interesting characters to be Helen, David's friend played by Rosamund Pike. Every time we see her, she looks stunning, in one absurdly expensive-looking fashion after another. She ...