SLIFF 2009 Review: AN EDUCATION

I’ve suffered through so many wretched ‘coming of age’ teenage memory movies, especially in recent years, that when a gem like AN EDUCATION pops up it’s cause for celebration. Superbly written by Nick Hornby, AN EDUCATION will be best remembered for its ‘Star is Born’ performance by a young actress named Carey Mulligan as Jenny, a promising but naive Oxford-primed schoolgirl in London circa 1961 who carries on an affair with a much older man. Based on the autobiography by British journalist Lynn Barber, AN EDUCATION is the second English-language film directed by Danish director Lone Scherfig. Despite it’s uncomfortable premise, Scherfig has made an uplifting, funny, and moving film that should draw audiences outside it’s arthouse trappings and will no doubt land Ms Mulligan a well-deserved Oscar nom.

In AN EDUCATION, Jenny lives with her stuffy parents in the London suburb of Twickenham and attends a strict, local girls’ school. An outstanding English student and lover of all things French, Jenny fantasizes about living in Paris with people “who know lots about lots” and is impatient in her quest for glory and glamour. Her parents, Marjorie (Cara Seymour) and Jack (Alfred Molina) just want her to go to Oxford and find a husband but Jenny is in a hurry to start doing adult things. One rainy day, a handsome and sophisticated man (Peter Sarsgaard) twice her age offers her a lift in his car. His name is David and Jenny finds him charming, intelligent, and as a Jew, exotic. Jenny is smitten and, as a worldly man he offers her an ‘education’ that isn’t covered at her private school. His habit of stealing artwork at first bothers her but he pays for romantic weekends in Paris and she sees him as her conduit to the finer things in life. Besides,
He’s won over her initially skeptical mom and dad so Jenny is blissfully in love until some of David’s darker secrets begin to emerge.

A lot of fuss has been made about the performance by Carey Mulligan in AN EDUCATION. Playing a girl whose intelligence far exceeds her life experience, the actress (actually 23 but playing 16 convincingly) certainly hits all the right notes. I keep reading comparisons to Audrey Hepburn and there are similar charms but this association seems at times forced with her manner of dress and hairdos and the film’s visual style during its Paris sequence. Jenny is a keenly written character from a smart memoir and I hope all of the praise Mulligan receives doesn’t overshadow the equally fine work by her co-stars. Peter Sarsgaard, a catholic American actor interestingly cast as a British Jew, is her equal, at times charming, courteous, and with his slightly fey lispy accent, a bit creepy. Alfred Molina is so funny as Jenny’s overbearing father and Rosamund Pike as David’s sexy but vacuous friend steals every scene she’s in.

The plot is somewhat predictable, David’s revelations are hardly surprising, and there’s some pointless voice-over narration that is suddenly introduced into the last five minutes, but AN EDUCATION is an example of how far a good script can carry a film. After Jenny loses her virginity to David in a Paris hotel, she gazes out a window and says “It’s funny, all that poetry and all those songs about something that lasts no time at all.” It’s a great line and one of many from this highbrow but accessible movie.