An Education in creepery — Peter Saarsgard (r) charms his 16-year-old girlfriend’s parents in Lone Sherfig’s new drama
An Education will make you nostalgic for a time you have never experienced. Set in London during the early ’60s, the film paints an oh-so-charming picture of urban English life post-Second World War and pre-Beatlemania. Men wear stylish suits; women, appealing dresses. Paris is a cultural behemoth that beckons with its detached chic. New boundaries are opening up in music, art and film. Under director Lone Scherfig’s eye, the vibrancy of the period is palpable and the desire to be young enough to take advantage of it is downright intoxicating.
Jenny (Carey Mulligan), a precocious teenager, is budding into her adulthood during this time, and the bevy of wonderful experiences the world offers transfixes her, much like it will audiences. She questions the value of her schoolwork, and her previous intentions to get into Oxford — an all-consuming passion for her status-obsessed father (Alfred Molina) — doesn’t seem nearly as important as seeing the world. To help push her into the dizzying city lights, fancy dinners and weekend getaways is David (Peter Saarsgard), a charismatic older man who sweeps Jenny off her feet with a carefree adult lifestyle.
Scherfig lovingly captures this ideal world that David and Jenny inhabit while simultaneously showing how deeply it is flawed. Audiences will pine for those clothes, those nightclubs, that wit, but they’ll also see the problems that come with them. As alluring as the world of An Education is, it’s clear that it runs on significant gender, class and racial segregation, leaving audiences with a chaser of conflicted feelings to go along with all that nostalgia.
This feeling extends to the characters themselves. It’s abundantly clear that a man in his 30s should not be sleeping with a girl in her teens, but thanks to Nick Hornby’s tight script and a commanding performance by Saarsgard, David’s charm will affect audiences just as much as it does Jenny and her parents. The relationship is wrong and it’s obviously going to end up being bad for Jenny, but Scherfig and Hornby make you almost wish that the other shoe doesn’t have to drop.
It’s when it does that An Education runs into a bit of trouble. Once things go predictably pear-shaped, the film races through a series of uncomfortable life experiences for Jenny and an honest-to-God training montage as she learns her lesson and comes of age. By this point, though, Scherfig has earned enough goodwill to excuse a formulaic, dashed-off ending that was inevitable from the word go. Its final moments may be lacking, but the rest of An Education is executed well enough to make you want to permanently live inside the movie, even as it shows you exactly why that’s a bad idea.
Post the first comment: (Login or Register)