An Education

From the coming-of-age, British-teen-girl film file comes An Education
(Sony Classics; 100 minutes; PG-13; widescreen; 2009), director Lone
Scherfig’s rather delicate, sharply observed drama of deflowered
adolescence, class conflicts and the state of womanhood circa 1961
Twickenham, England, this movie’s beguiling time and place. 

Seemingly light years before The Beatles met Ed Sullivan and mod Carnaby Street dictated the world’s fashions, An Education’s
setting feels hermetically sealed in its mildly repressed,
stiff-upper-lip world order. Our protagonist Jenny (Carey Mulligan), a
16-year-old schoolgirl cellist, strives for decent grades so she can
enter Oxford, even as she cribs cigarettes on the side and plays
phonographs of Parisian jazz chanteuse Juliette Greco. “I want to
smoke, wear black and listen to Jacques Brel,” the wanna-be Francophile
says to her classmates, although her flustered pop (Alfred Molina)
boils it down to two extremes: “You’re either a joiner-inner or a
rebel.”

Jenny’s plans become derailed with the
dashing entrance of 30-something mystery man David (Peter Sarsgaard).
The pair’s “meet cute” sequence takes place in a rainstorm, as David
tools up in his sporty Bristol automobile and, music lover that he is,
asks if he can transport Jenny’s cello case instead of her. (Director
Scherfig skips the subtlety here by adding rumbles of thunder to the
soundtrack, to achieve the requisite aural foreshadowing of doom.) 

David quickly asks Jenny to attend a
series of platonic dates, as his champagne tastes for jazz clubs and
fine art (Jenny’s a pushover for pre-Raphaelite works) soon becomes
apparent. Much murkier is the fact that David never seems to work for a
living, although his moneymaking skills are eventually revealed during
a series of unflattering revelations. As David cautiously seduces the
bowled-over Jenny (who at least refrains from surrendering herself
until her 17th birthday), he likewise charms her middle-class parents
(Cara Seymour plays the mostly silent mum), with her dad thinking that
Jenny can now forget about Oxford because David is certainly socially
acceptable husband material. 

A few British flicks from the mid-1960s boasted a similar May-December central romance, such as Georgy Girl and Girl with Green Eyes, although An Education
skews earlier both in terms of its time period and its leading lady’s
tender age. The burgeoning relationship between Jenny and David sounds
borderline creepy in 2009, although the age of sexual consent in
England has been 16 for many decades. Even so, Scherfig—who displays
none of the Dogme-style improvs found in her 2000 Danish hit Italian for Beginners—is more concerned with emotional nuances from her characters instead of striving for Lolita-esque pandering. 

Mulligan, age 24 and already
short-listed for Academy Award consideration, digs deep into her
waifish Jenny, managing to be book-smart yet still awash in an
appealing innocence that will be momentarily compromised before the
movie’s climax. (The spry script adaptation by High Fidelity
author Nick Hornby, from Lynn Barber’s memoir, seems uncannily right in
capturing the impromptu cadences of teenhood.) Meanwhile, Sarsgaard,
who needed two dialect coaches to help pull off David’s accent, gets to
be Cary Grant-suave on the surface even as he grooves to Jenny’s
cultural virginity. The actor is also adept at remaining somewhat
likable even when David explains about his unscrupulous sideline as a
real-estate blockbuster, which further underscores this film’s social
drama.

Also solid are Dominic Cooper and
Rosamund Pike as David’s party-hearty buddies, Olivia Williams as a
bespectacled English teacher who hopes to right Jenny’s decisions in
life, Emma Thompson in an extended cameo as the vaguely anti-Semitic
headmistress, and Molina scores a loverly moment as Jenny’s dad
attempts a late-in-the-game mea culpa. And the soundtrack nuggets are
shrewdly selected, from Floyd Cramer’s piano vamping for the 1961 hit
“On the Rebound” heard during the opening credits, to the overheated
orchestrations for Duffy’s 2008 “Smoke Without Fire,” which actually
sounds like a lost musical treasure from the 1960s. 

Although Jenny declares during a
post-coital moment, “Funny, isn’t it: All that poetry and all those
songs about something that lasts no time at all,” the timeless
growing-pains themes of An Education have far more lasting value.