Review: An Education (2009)

The life of a child is an enviable one. The child dreams more—and more often—because, some would say, he doesn’t know any better; he doesn’t know what awaits him. By most definitions, this is ignorance. Jenny (the wonderful Carey Mulligan) may be the most blissful teenager ever, surviving dreary schooldays in 1960s London by immersing herself in all things French: the music of Juliette Gréco, the films, the language. She knows much about art and other things above her class, but has never had the means or opportunity to see them for herself. Older David (Peter Sarsgaard) offers her both on a rainy day, and she accepts with all the wide-eyed eagerness we expect from a girl her age. Over the course of Lone Scherfig’s outstanding film, David opens Jenny’s eyes wider and wider, until the day her eyes can take no more. They’ve seen too much, too fast.

And what talented eyes they are. Mulligan deserves an Oscar for perfectly capturing the bittersweetness of The First Time – a moment you always remember, because there will never be another like it. Scherfig’s direction and Nick Hornby’s screenplay are exercises in subtlety, from the sensuality of the inaugural unclasping of a bra strap to the vulnerability of waiting for a letter from Oxford to tell you you’re good enough. Paul Englishby’s score so fully immerses us in this era of fedoras, smoke-filled rooms, and fine art that you’ll find yourself rooting for Jenny’s exercise in naïveté; her attempt to attain a life we all want, but are smart enough to not expect.

Newcomer Mulligan holds her own against a superb supporting cast that includes Alfred Molina as her overbearing father Jack and Emma Thompson as a strict headmistress. Adults are the villains in this film, and rightfully so – who else is to blame for educating us on life’s one great Truth: you can’t have everything. But who are they to stop us from trying? Jenny confronts Jack on a staircase, imploring him to be a father, just as Jim does in Rebel Without A Cause. Staircases encapsulate all the excitement and danger of adolescence: we want to run up and down them, but we want someone—a parent—there to catch us when we fall, too.

An Education is my favorite film of the year, and one I won’t soon forget. Like Jenny, it is relentlessly optimistic. She faces growing up head-on, with no remorse for her mistakes. And how can she feel bad, when she has so much fun making them? I admire Jenny‘s ambition, and her refusal to settle on a life anything less than interesting. I also fear for her. Sarsgaard nearly steals the film with a single chin quiver that sums up the inevitable emptiness of a life lived solely in pursuit of First Times. I suppose the real tragedy is never trying to live such a life. Or maybe that’s just the child in me talking.

Clarence Hammond
© Cinephile Magazine, 2009