1/2

An Education, thematically complex, elegantly fashioned and breathtakingly acted, is a poignant coming-of-age story for both a character and a country, essentially a soap opera made vibrantly electric. But unhappily, it is a very good film that stumbles in the home stretch and just misses out on being a great film.

Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is 16 going on 36, an astonishingly bright and self-assured girl who yearns to escape her suffocating provincial London suburb and the girl’s preparatory school that cares as much, if not more, for transforming its charges into proper young women as it does reading, writing and arithmetic. The year is 1961 and stuffy old England is just shy of embracing The Beatles and Swinging Sixties liberation. Jenny imagines herself at Oxford, a place, in her mind at least, of unbridled intellectual bohemianism. But the path to get there is anything but. Everything she does, from studying Latin to playing the cello, is meant to maximize her chances of being selected for the prestigious university. And while Jenny wants to get to Oxford as much as her parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour), the Francophile, bordering on pretentious snob, prefers speaking in sentences peppered with French, smoking Russian cigarettes, poo-pooing the bourgeoisie, extolling the virtues of New Wave cinema and singing along to Juliette Greco albums in her room.

Enter David (Peter Sarsgaard), a handsome, well off man somewhere in his mid-30s who gives Jenny a ride in his flashy sports car during a rainstorm. David is dashing, debonair and witty, a libertine who lives a heady life of lavish excess — attending classical concerts, eating at fine restaurants, buying pre-Raphaelite art at auction. He is an exotic man of the world who offers to enroll Jenny in the school of life. Obviously he is a cad. This isn’t a romantic comedy and as such, 30-something-year-old men do not prey on teenage girls without tasting blood in the pubescent waters. But David is so genteel, warm and believable that, though we are certain he is up to no good, we can never truly bring ourselves to loathe him. Jenny has tenfold David’s intelligence though he has tenfold her experience. All she knows she learned in magazines, films and lurid locker room conversation. She is exceedingly bright, to be sure, but she overvalues her smarts, thinking and acting as if she were wiser than her experience permits. She is, in a word, a teenager.

The smooth-talker woos Jenny’s parents, ingratiating himself into her family with an astounding charm offensive. Jack, Jenny’s unsophisticated father (the sort of man who says it is far better to know a great writer than to be one, presumably because of the stereotype of the poor artist), suddenly finds his resentment of the upper class withering away in David’s presence. David takes Jenny away for long weekend trips, including Paris (if he is using her, she, it must be said, is using him too), and introduces her to his high-living friends (Dominic Cooper and Rosamund Pike) who, of course, are not quite what they appear. Like David, they see culture not as something to be earned through experience so much as something one buys (or steals) and sells. Jenny stays with David even after she grows suspicious of his intentions because with him, at least, life is not boring. Eventually, however, David’s meticulously maintained plot crumbles, leaving Jenny unsure if she can salvage her academic future, much less her now very publicly soiled reputation. At long last her experience is commensurate with her education.

Danish director Lone Scherfig (Italian for Beginners) and screenwriter Nick Hornby (About a Boy, High Fidelity) have made an exquisite film, simple and classy. They’ve based their work on a memoir by British journalist Lynn Barber who herself carried on a two-year affair with a much older man while still a schoolgirl.

For most of its running time, An Education positively purrs, but as it rounds the final lap — rushed, tidy and relatively consequence free — it becomes profoundly dishonest. Just at the moment you would expect it to say, “See here, these are the wages of sin,” it skulks cowardly away from the very confrontation the plot demands. Jenny’s hard life lessons could have — realistically should have — been harder, but instead An Education makes her into some sort of feminist vanguard and seems to suggest that mistake or no, we’d never go back and undo our blunders for they are the very things that make us who we are. That, of course, is one of life’s great paradoxes — maturity is gained not through ecstasy but through agony. Yet who among us wouldn’t wish away our most profound mistakes no matter how wise it made us in the end?

Still, it’s not as though Jenny hasn’t a point — why get an education if it is only to bait a husband? Isn’t there more to life? Her parents want her to read at Oxford only because they know it will attract the best kind of men, not so that she might expand her consciousness. When everything falls apart, she and her father are equally guilty — he for allowing David to circumvent his misguided plan for his daughter’s life (which would at least open her up to new ideas and experiences in spite of of his intentions) and she for pushing him to it (though for motives far more carnal). Jenny’s problem is that she has a fundamental misunderstanding of Faulkner’s “action is character.” Dynamism may be a good literary device, but it often wreaks havoc on character when the word is defined as one’s honor and reputation, rather than a state of being. Jenny embraces agitation and chaotic action precisely because, uncontrollable as it is, it is the one decision she made for herself.

The acting in An Education absolutely sparkles. Olivia Williams is perfect as a beautiful woman hidden behind a schoolmarm exterior (the person Jenny fears she will grow up to become) and Emma Thompson cameos deliciously as a racist headmistress. Alfred Molina is a scene-stealer, shockingly blind to his paternal duties and protective instincts. Molina’s Jack does not even realize that he is selling his daughter off to the highest bidder like so much chattel. Peter Sarsgaard, who does a convincing British accent, plays David as a dirty rotten scamp but one so bright and charming and so un-predatory that even we occasionally doubt our suspicions that he must be a cad. Though David’s affections for Jenny may be sincere, that does not make them any less villainous.

But if any actor owns An Education, it is Carey Mulligan, who, in her first big role, allows us to observe and participate in something truly special — the birth of a major talent. Mulligan, who seems, at times, to be channeling Audrey Hepburn, is quite simply astonishing. Her smiles are like sunrises, her eyes are like tractor beams pinning us helplessly to our seatbacks. Hers should be the first name springing to everyone’s lips come the nominations for the Academy Awards.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.