If you were a sixteen-year-old girl and a rich, handsome older man promised to take you away from your boring life and jet you off to Paris, buy you expensive clothes and expose you to a sophisticated world you only dreamed of experiencing, what would you do? That's the key question at the center of AN EDUCATION. The viewer watches the main character make all the wrong decisions, but can you blame her?
Jenny (Carey Mulligan, PRIDE & PREJUDICE) is a smart young girl working hard to get into Oxford on scholarship. Her father Jack (Alfred Molina, SPIDER-MAN 2) is an unrelenting tightwad who pushes her to succeed. Her mother Majorie (Cara Seymour, THE NOTORIOUS BETTY PAGE) just smiles and nods in the background. On a rainy day while she is waiting by the bus stop, the charming David (Peter Sarsgaard, GARDEN STATE) offers to give her a ride home in his sports car under the pretense that he's only a music fan looking out for the cello she is carrying. Soon Jenny becomes drunk on David's lavish world.
Mulligan's performance is getting all the praise and rightfully so. She is key to the film's entire success. She grabs hold of the audience and pulls us into her character's soul. We might not agree with the actions she takes, but we understand why she takes them. In a wonderful scene, she argues with her headmistress (Emma Thompson, SENSE & SENSIBILITY) why she should choose Oxford over David when the former is simply a life of boring hard work that leads to more boring hard work. Mulligan's passion for this speech nearly convinces us that she is doing the right thing. Nearly.
However, the audience has the advantage of seeing David from an outside perspective. From the start, what does a man in his 30s want with a 16 year old girl? Jenny becomes smitten with the way David lies to and manipulates her stuffy parents. I mean how can boys her age even compete? Molina plays Jack as a naïve fearful man who can't see David as anything other than an opportunity for his daughter to be taken care of. Her mother isn't as naïve, but she's completely scared to tell her husband what she knows. She hopes on the fantasy, but fears it's too good to be true. Sarsgaard makes David a conniving man-child, who drapes himself in culture because its part of his job. Any what does he do for a living anyway?
Jenny is a smart girl, who sees David as an opportunity to get her dreams. For David, she's a pretty young girl with more in her head than Helen (Rosamund Pike, PRIDE & PREJUDICE), the girlfriend of his partner Danny (Dominic Cooper, MAMMA MIA!), but innocent enough to put up with him. Through her relationship with David, Jenny becomes the talk of her school. But her teacher Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams, RUSHMORE) just sees a promising student floating away on the wind, and it breaks her heart.
Writer Nick Hornby (HIGH FIDELITY) adapted Lynn Barber's memoir into a fictional film infused with the honesty of life. Early on Jenny asks David where he studied and he said he has a degree from the school of life. Jenny has to decide where she'd like to get her degree from and which school will give her the life she really wants.
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks
