An Education (2009)

They often say that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. This is certainly what Jenny (the breathtakingly fresh and Hepburn-esque Carey Mulligan) learns in AN EDUCATION. But the film's title is a loaded one, and this is not all she learns. And I was reminded, again, that sometimes the smallest films have the most deeply resonating life lessons.

I could write essays about the thematic layers in this wonderful film, written by superstar British author Nick Hornby and based on the memoir of Lynn Barber. The film was directed by Lone Scherfig, a Danish woman making her film debut in English. I knew nothing about Scherfig until I looked her up on IMDB after watching the film, including her gender. It seems fitting in retrospect that this film was directed by a woman, because the main character, Jenny, manages to escape the "victim" trappings that characters like this are known for.

And it would be easy to see Jenny as a victim. Set in middle-class England in 1961, Jenny is a 16 year-old school girl with aspirations of going to Oxford. Or at least those are her father's aspirations. Played fantastically by the always great Alfred Molina, Jack is no-nonsense about his daugther's education. Her obvious passion for the cello is, to him, good enough to put on the Oxford resume, but not something that she become a distraction. Play the music to say you did, but don't waste time at the orchestra hall.

On the way home from an orchestra rehearsal in the middle of a storm, Jenny meets David, a charming man who strikes up a conversation from the driver's seat of his sports car as Jenny walks home, drenched. They talk about music. David is much more passionate about that subject than her father is. A few more chance encounters (or are they?) with David, and Jenny starts to realize that her life is boring and that her parents are provincial stay-at-homers with no sense of adventure. He provides the prospect of excitement, never mind the fact that he appears to be in his mid-30s.

The cynical viewer knows a Lolita-hunter when he/she sees one and will take David's boundless charms as a one-track effort to deflower the plucky Jenny. But actor Peter Sarsgaard is better than that, making us wonder what else he has in mind. As he works his way into Jenny's world, he is careful to charm her mother, Marjorie (Cara Seymour) and, surprisingly, her stern father. It is not long before David is able to whisk Jenny away on adventures that most fathers of 16 year-old girls would never allow, let alone with a man of twice her age. We wonder what he's thinking until we discover that, perhaps, there is a double-standard in his traditional philosophy about education: that if you can marry the right man, you don't have to worry about it. Clearly, he is impressed with David and sees an alternative for his daugther.

I won't spoil it, but it goes without saying that when a 35 year-old man suddenly shows up in the life of a teenage girl, his charms are bound to camoflage his motives and, while David seems genuinely interested in Jenny, he turns out to be not exactly the guy she thought he was. I wish I could say more, but part of why I loved this film so much is the fact that while my gut told me what was going to happen in a general sense, the specific details are so wonderfully handled that I wouldn't want to ruin that experience for anyone else.

There are, essentially, two educations in AN EDUCATION. One is the sophistocated adult world that David exposes Jenny to, complete with his adult friends and even Paris. The other is the world of academia - the all-girl school Jenny attends as one of her teacher's brightest students and the prospect of an Oxford education. As it appears that Jenny might become willing to sacrifice all of this for a mysterious, older man, she must suffer through the warnings from the school's headmistress (Emma Thompson, so great here in a tiny, three-scene role) and Miss Stubbs, her teacher (played with perfect British repression by Olivia Williams).

By the end of this wonderful, enchanting and delightful 95-minute film, Jenny begins to discover that both educations are important, and neither are or were expendable. Thanks to the fantastic acting by Mulligan, we sense that Jenny is willing to learn from her mistakes, rather than be victimized by them. Her experiences outside of the classroom become a course she never knew she enrolled in.

As Jenny tells the headmistress in one of the film's most quietly powerful scenes: "It's not enough to educate us anymore. You've got to tell us why you're doing it." By the end of AN EDUCATION, Jenny is figuring out why. And I was figuring out that I had just seen one of the loveliest films of 2009, a charmer of a film with a depth and richness that betrays the lightness of its running time, romance and trendy, early-60s nightlife.

4.0 out of 4