An Education

After successful and popular film adaptation of his novels ‘High Fidelity’ and ‘About a Boy’, author Nick Hornby has branched out, adapting someone else’s book for the screen. The book is Lynn Barber’s memoir ‘An Education’, which, Like Hornby’s work, deals with maturity in pop-culture settings- here, a 16 year old London girl in the swinging 60’s (1961, to be exact). The girl is Jenny (Carey Mulligan), in her final year of high-school and preparing for her entry exams to Oxford. As far as her parents are concerned, everything she does, whether in school or in her free time, should contribute to the most ambitious goal any girl could hope to achieve: going to Oxford in order to come out with a cultured and successful husband.

 Jenny is a very smart girl, does her best at school, and while she dreams of the Bohemian life-style of smoking, reading, watching French films and listening to Juliette Gréco, she is not seriously considering alternatives to her father’s goals. Until one day, when He shows up.

He is David Goldman, Wandering Jew. Played by Peter Sarsgaard (sporting a good English accent), David is dashing, charming and suave. He and Jenny have a classic meet-cute, the kind that can launch the most fanciful romantic comedy. In this case, however, that meet-cute launches something that can be accurately described as a horror movie. You see, David is 35 years old. He seems to be a Bohemian spirit with expensive Bourgeois taste, palling around with two other dashing and beautiful pleasure-loving figures (Rosamund Pike and Dominic Cooper). These kinds of seductive and glamorous people rarely bode well for a young and impressionable protagonist, and the age difference makes it positively creepy. Every step Jenny takes in this world -sensually pleasing though it may be- is loaded with the audience’s dread. Who are these people? Why do they so willingly accept this 16 year old into their world? Who is David really? These questions are answered eventually, but it takes Jenny a lot longer to ask them than it takes the audience. However, the film is after all called ‘An Education’, so we know that eventually she will learn Important Life Lessons. It’s that knowledge that allows Hornby and director Lone Scherfig to achieve a terrific balancing act, as the basic uncomfortable wrongness of the situation is made bearable, and we are allowed to settle into this world a bit and enjoy the hedonism, just like Jenny (the predictability of the formula actually added something here).

This is not a film where the hero is exposed to absolute decadence and comes out wiser for it. Jenny needs it. She needs to taste the concerts, the Haute Couture, the auctions, the discussion of Camus, the trip to Paris…the education is not so much about what one should do with a life, but why one should do it (she thinks that “Action equals character” means that if you never do anything, you never become anyone). She has been asking herself ‘Why Oxford?’, and she needed to get to a point where she could ask ‘Is Paris better?’- i.e. there might be more to life than the constant search for self-gratification. This being 1960’s England, she is under the impression that Oxford represents a life-time of birthing and teaching- a lifetime of boredom (as she says in a blistering exchange with her teacher, played by Olivia Williams). The movie doesn’t dwell on Woman’s Lib, but it is a comfort to know that her options will have grown exponentially within years.

Mulligan is marvelous in the demanding lead role, managing wisdom beyond-her-years and extreme naiveté at the same time (something like Juno’s aunt from across the pond). She starts out an innocent, but eventually becomes aware of the seduction at work…and submits to it. A predator David may be, but Jenny is not unwilling to be prey. She’s bored with her Latin exams and cello playing, and is anxious for excitement, even if the experience she gets is rather more than she bargained for (though, interestingly, not much more). She lies to herself, but her perception of everyone around her can be lethally accurate- it’s not until it’s almost too late that she turns her incisive power of observation on herself. David is a mystery that takes some time to figure out, but once he deflowers her (with her complete consent- she’s been planning it for years), the innocence literally gone, the curtain starts rising.

 Sarsgaard makes David into a very interesting character. Predator, yes, to a certain extent. But he lends him a vulnerability that often renders him inscrutable. David is smart, but more than that, he’s clever. He’s terrific at convincing people that they’ve always dreamed of the possibility to do what he’s just offered- a con-man. But it’s not just cut and dry misdeeds- there’s often a wicked mischievousness in his actions that is hard to resist. In his first encounter with Jenny’s parents, David leverages Jenny’s father’s reluctance to use the word ‘Jew’ (so as not to seem racist) against him, turning the discomfort in the air into agreement. He uses people’s prejudice against them, compelling little old ladies to sell their houses for cheap because of the black family he installed in their building. I must admit, I was troubled by the concept of a thieving, lying Jew, but Jews have often been used as shorthand for outsiders, and Sarsgaard invested in the character enough vulnerability to allow me to swallow it, along with the assumption that the real person David is based on in the memoir was indeed Jewish (the uncomfortable after-taste still lingers, though). By the end, I think, David really does come to care for Jenny in his own way, even as he’s corrupting and exploiting her. Unfortunately, once he is finally and totally unmasked at the end, we get too little to know who he really is. The ending of this film is its biggest flaw, one which I will get to in a moment.

Of the other cast members, Alfred Molina is great as Jenny’s father. He’s funny in the early, hilariously small-minded and chauvinistic remarks (When Jenny says she could become a famous author, he says it’s better to know a famous author: “Becoming one is different from knowing one…shows you’re connected”). And he gets to shine as a wonderfully sweet shlub once his bluster is deflated. Cara Seymour says much less as Jenny’s mother, but she knows her daughter, and is mostly amused by her husband’s toothless outbursts.

Her counterpoint in David’s world is Danny, played by Dominic Cooper. As a fellow hedonist con-man, he is hardly an innocent, but understands the reality of David’s obsession with Jenny far better than either of them do. The stunning Rosamund Pike plays Helen, the last member of the group, and she gives a great comedic performance. She’s a dumb blonde, but not really ditzy. She simply doesn’t understand the classical music and art that David, Danny and Jenny adore. Knowing that she has little to add intellectually, she tries to make up for it with attractiveness. She can be offensive, but not in a cruel way- when she implies that Jenny doesn’t fit in in London and should move, she’s not being cruel, she’s honestly worried that this girl’s lack of glamour will doom her.

The last important cast members are Olivia Williams as Jenny’s teacher and Emma Thompson as her headmistress. Thompson is of an older generation- one of appropriateness and custom and prejudice. She’s not unkind, but she’s not particularly sympathetic to Jenny’s desperation to have fun (The movie brought to mind ‘She’s Leaving Home’ on more than one occasion). Williams, of a more open and warm attitude, supplies the capper to the education Jenny gets throughout. Unfortunately, it is in the wrapping up that is the biggest problem with the film (my only major problem with it, now that I think about it). The movie ends in a depressingly generic “Here’s what we’ve learned today, children” kind of way. It needed to end that way in some form or another, but over here, it’s presented in a tidy series of tidy scenes that felt too simple for a film that was so refreshingly varied up to that point. I wanted more dissonance, to complement that variety of notes sounded throughout the film.

Even with that complaint, however, the film is still one of the best I’ve seen this year. Scherfig has put together a great production, from the script (concise and sharp, I was at several points thrilled by the precision and insight of a dialogue exchanges), to the cinematography (John de Borman’s work is crisp and beautiful throughout, especially in a Paris sequence that captures the city in as beautiful a fashion as I’ve seen it done), hair, makeup and costumes (they kind of force one to consider Mulligan as an Audrey Hepburn type, and she doesn’t come off badly, though Hepburn also came to mind because of the movies where she had affairs with older men- Charade, Sabrina, Love in the Afternoon, Funny Face). The production design evokes a convincing 1960’s, a lived-in one, doesn’t feel like a synthesized fantasia on the period. Some of Scherfig’s directorial choices were surprisingly bold- Paul Englishby’s score initially sounds a bit stringy and overblown, but I realized that it was an intentional effect on the director’s part. She uses the lush score and beautiful lensing in the early Jenny/David scenes in an attempt to convince the audience to buy into this romance. The score is, in effect, lying to the audience, selling a romantic comedy, to get us closer to Jenny’s initial star-struck reaction to the world David shows her. I thought it was a gutsy move, one that impressed upon me the fact that this film was directed by someone with a vision regarding the material. The Danish born Scherfig comes from the Dogme 95 film movement, but makes a very confident feeling film with all the cinematic artifice that the movement abhors (which even Lars Von Trier has retreated from). Ending aside, this film could have been fine on the basis of its strong script and great performances alone, but both are served exceptionally well by the director, who mounted a production to match them. I loved this movie.