Movie Review: An Education
Set in early 1960s London, one of the greatest triumphs of An Education is that the script could be transplanted into the modern day with few revisions. Writer, Nick Hornby (About a Boy and High Fidelity) has presented a world in which the characters are stunningly relatable despite his characteristic, occasionally too perfect, banter. It’s the story of a girl and a man, the man falls in love with the girl and the girl falls in love with the man’s world. The coming-of-age tale is strangely romantic, while the disturbing elements are played subtly the audience is enticed, along with the heroine, down a path that is a little too dark.
Jenny (Carrie Mulligan), the private schoolgirl protagonist, is a bright student with dreams of Oxford and intellectual emancipation from her parents. Her rebellions are quaint; listening to French crooners and sneaking the occasional cigarette with her school friends but, as expected, this routine life is swiftly swept aside when the middle-aged yet charming David (Peter Saarsgard) happens upon the young girl as she is caught in a rainstorm and offers an ostensibly innocuous rescue.
Mulligan plays Jenny, with such genuine grace and depth that the audience will forgive her almost any stupidity (of which there are several). David offers Jenny a world of fine art, fine jazz and rich friends and as she is seduced the young girl disposes of her acuity to chase a bourgeois fantasy that is all too clearly not what it seems.
Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour as Jenny’s parents provide a solid grounding for the film, determined that Jenny will have the best, but they are beaten by David in the sophistication department, and they are as eager as their daughter at the possibilities that this fine gentleman offers.
The Europe of the 1960s does not intrude on the narrative, but provides a gorgeous backdrop. Before The Beatles were unleashed on the youth of that time and place, Jenny’s journey works as somewhat of a parable. The education Jenny receives was not sought, but it marks the destruction of a wide eyed naivety and the transition to maturity that can only come from universal disillusionment.
An Education is a complex film. The tribulations experienced by Jenny are handled lightly but the content is actually quite disturbing. This is a movie where everyone makes mistakes, but the appropriate distribution of punishment is what the audience must consider.
