Drama. Starring Carey Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard. Directed by Lone Scherfig.
"An Education" is a smart memoir with a complicated point of view, and it takes place in London in the early 1960s. Don't picture the swinging-'60s London of a few years later, but the London of drab conformity. The movie features, as its heroine, a teenage girl who dreams of getting out, who wants glory and glamour, who wants to speak French, dress in black and immerse herself in culture. The movie is about how she goes about getting those things, but too early and not in the best way.
Written by Nick Hornby and based on a memoir by Lynn Barber, the movie evokes that special time when a young person is most sensitive to art and most receptive to new experience. When Jenny (Carey Mulligan) goes to a nightclub for the first time or attends her first concert, her face is a study in delight and rapture. Not a corny rapture, but rather that uniquely teenage combination of self-awareness and complete engagement and happiness. After one such evening, she tells her mother she had the best night of her life. She says it matter-of-factly, the way an intelligent teenager might if it were true.
Mulligan deserves the accolades she's been getting for months, ever since the film played at the Sundance and Berlin film festivals last winter. Her face has brightness and wit - she makes Jenny very much the embodiment of the promising young person, with a fully developed mind and body, who is still trapped in the circumstances of a child. She may very well have been the best possible person to play the role, and one never tires of looking at her onscreen.
Yet a nagging reservation lingers: She plays a 16-year-old, and she made the film at 23. Sixteen and 23 are an eternity apart. This is not like a 43-year-old playing a 36-year-old. In some shots, Mulligan has
the faint beginnings of crow's feet, and she smokes cigarettes as if she's been knocking down a pack a day for years. Most important, aside from the schoolgirl's uniform she wears, she looks like a fairly reasonable match for Peter Sarsgaard as David, a man in his 30s who takes an interest in her.As an actor, just standing there, Sarsgaard brings a mix of interesting contradictory qualities - a smile that's engaging but concealing, a breezy self-assurance that seems to be covering something, maybe weakness, maybe just shyness; and eyes that are a little too watchful to be completely friendly. In "An Education," these qualities come together in the service of a character who is charming, funny, courteous ... and a little bit unsettling.
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