An Education is the first of director Lone Scherfig’s that I’ve seen. I’d known that it was generally well received and that Carey Mulligan had been nominated for her performance going in, but wasn’t sure if the film as a whole would have more to offer than being a typical chick flick with a bit more of an intellectual slant. Whether it’s right or wrong, without some great force of talent or wit behind a project like this, I can find it pretty hard as a 28 year-old man to become completely enthralled with a coming of age romance story about a teenage girl. I’ve never filled my notebooks with somebody’s name, I’ve never squealed at the prospect of a candle lit dinner; if I’m going to appreciate a film like this it has to succeed as a solidly put together piece of storytelling first, and as a romance second. Much to my joy, I found An Education to be a success on all counts. It reminded me of the kind of simple, but competently told stories that used to be able to, at the same time, entertain the masses and also comment intriguingly on the human condition, back in the hayday of the studio system. Back when filmmakers seemed to care more.
The story, set in early 60s London, tells the story of a sharp as a tack high school girl named Jenny (Carey Mulligan) who has her life long plans of enrolling in Oxford interrupted by a sudden romance with an older gentleman named David (Peter Sarsgaard). It’s based on the real life memoirs of a British journalist named Lynn Barber. More than anything, Jenny dreams of a life filled with art, culture, and hoity-toity parties; you know, life in Paris. Her parents are working class people, and she lives in a working class town, so up until this point all of her dreams have seemed a bit far off and unrealistic; enrollment in a bastion of intellectualism like Oxford being her only chance at escaping the mundanity of her upbringing and surroundings. David, then, represents all of these far off dreams being turned on their head. He is an easy fix that nobody saw coming. David has money, he has intellectual friends, he takes trips into the city, he appreciates art, and he knows literature. He is everything that Jenny’s family and schoolmates aren’t. In the face of all this, the fact that he is twice her age becomes nearly irrelevant.
A typical film with this setup would likely follow a very familiar pattern. Jenny would meet David, an escapist second act of would detail newfound happiness and experience, their age difference would cause a wrinkle putting their future in question, but then, in the end, love would conquer all and Jenny would find exactly the future she was looking for. Praise be all the Gods in the heavens, this is not that movie. An Education doesn’t take place in a cinematic fantasy world, but something much more closely resembling our reality. It is a coming of age film, but more than that it is the coming of age film coming of age. Was that too cheesy? Regardless, An Education is a complex film whose characters do more than overcome a singular obstacle and then emerge fully formed and capable. Here nothing comes without a price, traumatic experiences leave scars. There are no happy endings, just endings that we can either let get the best of us, or that we can make the best of.
Jenny, while being a bright young prospect and mature beyond her years, is neither as mature as she wants to be, nor as mature as she thinks she is. She is susceptible to flattery, enchanted by any notion that she might be special or refined. David uses this to get her under his spell, and we as viewers are reticent to believe his motives as being pure and altruistic, but Jenny, in her naïveté, can’t help but be swept up by the possibility of all her dreams coming true. The film would fail if it were inevitable tragedy. If David and Jenny’s tragic end were always looming ahead of us like the iceberg in Titanic, An Education would be nothing more than an emotional variation on the torture porn tropes of the Hostel series. Where it succeeds is in making David likable. We get the sense that he truly does care for Jenny, he may have her best interests at heart, and things might end up working out okay for them. Our common sense tells us that a romance between a girl in her teens and a man in his thirties is doomed and inappropriate, but An Education always gives us enough to keep us hopeful, and a large part of that is due to the amazing work of its actors.
Sarsgaard endears us to his character through sheer force of charm. He has a quick explanation for all of his actions, and a smile and a wink to make the pill go down with sugar. He is able to explain both to the viewer and Jenny’s parents why he might be interested in spending time with a teenage girl. He is too pleasant, too empathetic, too refined to be anything less than a quality human being. Even when the story starts to give us hints that something else might be going on, that his business dealings may be less than reputable, we are still willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. He freely admits to just enough impropriety to allow us to give him our trust on the rest. Without an actor as charming as Sarsgaard, An Education would have taken on the mood of a horror film: a lumbering, horrific predator methodically stalking an unaware co-ed. On a purely technical level, his accent is never distracting, he is always believable as his character, and he has good chemistry with Mulligan. But, on a deeper level, he might have just been the right man for the job. He has the twinkle in his eye and the gentleness of his soul necessary to pull someone as potentially reprehensible as this character off and not degenerate the material into typical villainy.
All of the supporting roles are cast pitch perfect and work to add to the complexity of the story. Rosamund Pike and Dominic Cooper play David’s cohorts Helen and Danny. They add a lot of weight to the David character. They seem to be solid, reputable people, and if they are close to David, then surely he must be enough of an ordinary chap to place our trust in. Too many times in setups like this the David character will have no past, no private life whatsoever, and then we’re supposed to be in shock when it turns out he is a total psychopath. Here we are given a bit of insight into David’s life, it is never treated as a mystery that he might be a less than stellar human being, and therefore we aren’t let down when a too predictable swerve is “revealed” in the third act. Pike’s character is a bit of an idiot in comparison to her more educated counterparts, and it’s generally played for laughs, but it’s never so broad that things descend into straight comedy. The gags are subtle and underplayed. Much of the audience might not even pick up on the fact that she is being made fun of. This strategy of not talking down to people was much appreciated, and serves to raise An Education above typical, pandering entertainment. Olivia Williams plays Jenny’s literature teacher Ms. Stubbs and is awesome, awesome, awesome. She is, on the surface, buttoned down and conservative, but she is always able to project the sense that a deeper character lies underneath. She isn’t given the most amount of screen time, but the scenes where her character shows up are maybe the most complex and interesting in the film. She sees things that the other characters in the film don’t. She has the intelligence of Jenny, but also the maturity that she lacks. It’s not hard to imagine that perhaps Ms. Stubbs might have been in a similar situation to Jenny not that long ago, but Jenny is too single minded and self centered to consider such possibilities, and it make their interactions fascinating to watch. Alfred Molina plays a very difficult character. As Jenny’s father he spends half of the film blindly pushing her toward academic success and nothing else, and the other half blindly pushing her into a relationship with a much older man simply due to the status and success that life with him would afford her. For much of the movie he is very unlikable, but we’re always given just enough to keep caring about him and believing in his relationship with his daughter. He is a man of limitations, but his primary motivation is always to make sure that his daughter rises above them and has a better time of things than he did. He is not perfect, and makes mistakes in the film, but they are always made in pursuit of a greater good. These are subtle points to get across and a lesser actor might have made the father character come off as nothing more than a contemptible taskmaster. Molina is perfect in the role and able to make us stay with him all the way through.
While the supporting roles color the film and raise it to heights above most of it’s contemporaries, the heart of the film lives and dies on the shoulders of Carey Mulligan. As you may have heard, she’s a wonder to watch. She’s all dimples and youthful enthusiasm. As the film is constructed, and due to her fresh faced, earnest exuberance you can’t help but develop a crush on her over the course of the story. This is complicated by the presence of Sarsgaard’s character, always lurking over her, always highlighting the dark side of the feelings that may or may not be innocent on your part. Mulligan’s character is never one thing; she’s conflicted, and she’s confused. She’ll play the role of the feminist revolutionary to her father when he wants her to forgo university and commit to David, but she’ll play the role of the doting bride to Ms. Stubbs when she voices her concerns on the matter. That she can switch from motivation to motivation from moment to moment, but always feel like the same, whole character is astonishing. We imagine that the decisions she’s making are going to lead to disaster, but we’re never quite sure that we’re right. When asked by the school to sacrifice her new life of art auctions and high society galas to continue her studies, Jenny retorts, “It’s not enough to teach us anymore, you’ve got to tell us why you’re doing it.” She may be young and confused, but she’s playing around with some truths. And not only is she spouting some truths in this, she’s learning some as well. Over the course of her relationship she is confronted by moral compromise. She learns that nothing is simple or comes for free. All levels of the story are peppered with wonderful complexities, and things never get as boring as they do in most relationship dramas. While this may have been the case of the perfect part rather than the perfect actress, Mulligan takes the ball she is handed and runs with it. It’s hard to imagine anyone else doing better with the role.
So, it’s safe to say that this is not just a typical chick flick that we are dealing with here. More than anything, An Education is a movie about the decisions we make and how they shape us as people. In the film, Jenny remarks, “Action is character. I think it means if we never did anything, we wouldn’t be anybody.” Not only is this a useful insight into human nature, but it can also be looked at as a comment on how to successfully construct a story. The characters in An Education make important decisions, they take risks, and they face real consequences according to their choices. This goes a long way toward making them people we remember, and characters we enjoy spending time with. Combine this success of storytelling with the competent way in which the film is put together; all by the book blocking and cinematography, effective but non-intrusive production design, and you get a film that not only looks like, but can stand next to the Hollywood classics of yesteryear. An Education doesn’t feel like the typical film romance, it feels like something smarter and better.
