Set in 1961 England, An Education examines the limited options for a young woman, offering either the academic route that would lead to a life of education and a professorial profession, or the wife of a husband who offers security. We fine Jenny Mellor caught in this binary as she is too bright for a 16 year old, but at the same time, her knowledge of haute culture far outweighs any experience she feigns when confronted with an assimilation in to such culture.
That said, I’m not sure how entertaining this movie would have been if it weren’t for Carey Mulligan’s performance as Jenny. Around her schoolyard friends, Carey is a confident, cocky ingénue who is ready to tackle the world and intellectually dwarfs her academic peers; however, when Mellor catches the attention of thirty-six year old playboy David (played by Peter Sarsgaard, who adequately replaces creepiness with genuineness), Mulligan conveys Jenny’s insecurities with subtle facial expressions and meticulous body language.
One scene in particular finds Jenny, Peter, his partner Graham (Matthew Beard), and Graham’s lady friend Hattie (Amanda Fairbank-Hynes) in a smoke and gin-filled dance hall high above a dog racing track that speaks to the upper class.
As Graham dances, he snares Jenny and leads her to the dance floor; her body moves apprehensively—she has knowledge of this type of dancing, but has never experienced it—until it smoothly syncopates with Graham’s, and with every brief word of enjoyment, a slight smile creeps across her lips, momentarily exposing her adolescence, and then resigns to a smirk that says, “I’ve done this before.”
Aside from performances by Carey Mulligan and Alfred Molina, who plays her bewildered father who himself is an academic seemingly without knowledge of the world outside of his living room—he refuses to travel to Paris because the last time he was there “they didn’t like us,” and implores his daughter to master Latin (an already dead language at this time) so that she might gain admission to Oxford, most notable is how David’s creepiness is elided. Granted, An Education is set in 1961, and if you ask Roman Polanski, mi hot tub es su chica joven hot tub, but still, director Lone Scherfig never tries to hide the crow’s feet that emerge from the corners of David’s eyes when his charmingly perverted smile perpetually crosses his face. What this suggests is that when the opportunity presents itself, the society depicted in An Education, particularly the one that patriarch Jack Mellory (Molina) belongs to, values a daughter’s matrimony-centered security over anything else.
Because of the whimsical soundtrack, and the patience with which David acts to seduce Jenny, we forget that a pedophilic creepiness resides below the surface of this tale. And of course, the creepiness cracks through the veneer, and in some manner, I think this is why people are split on the validity of An Education. Screenwriter Nick Hornby and Scherfig don’t try to trick us. David—albeit captivating in his free-spirit ways—is creepy from the moment we meet him, so Jenny’s discovery that he is in fact a creep and a phony shouldn’t be taken as a twist. Perhaps it should be taken as a site of innocence lost or a nostalgic reminder that we’ve all had a moment where our naivety had the better of us and we refused to acknowledge that our wisdom was merely book-learned.
Honestly, if Mulligan took home an Oscar this March, I wouldn’t be disappointed, and quite frankly I’m kind of pulling for her; her subtlty and timing thus far supersede the ability to don a Southern accent.
At the same time, I’m not sure if An Education would make my top five movies of the year, so I guess it also shows that maybe ten movies is too many to sift through for a Best Picture, but that’s a post for another time.
DYL MAG Score: 8
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