Charlie Dorf
Reporter
As teenagers, we feel as if our lives are planned out for us. Get good grades, go to a good college, get a good job and … whatever comes after that. Often, we seek an escape, something more than our life pre-determined.
Lone Scherfig’s “An Education” nails this struggle perfectly through the character of Jenny Miller (Carey Mulligan). Jenny is an Oxford-bound 16 year- old living in 1961 England. She finds (at least initially) her escape in David (Peter Skarsgaard), a 30-something posh, clever fellow who can talk art, drives a sports car, and goes to jazz clubs. He embodies everything Jenny longs for in her life trapped in the lower middle class suburb of Twickenham.
Right off the bat, Mulligan does a fantastic job at portraying the clever, cynical, yet slightly naïve Jenny. As her first major film role, Mulligan delivers a stellar performance as a girl trying to carve her own path in life, and ultimately learns some tough yet beneficial lessons in the process. An interesting thing Mulligan manages to do is that, even though her character makes several poor decisions, you never feel mad at her. You view every mistake as a learning experience. Though this isn’t often the case in real life, Milligan’s performance left an impressive effect on the audience.
Even though Jenny is an aspiring intellectual, (a straight-A student bound to study English at Oxford), but also sneaks cigarettes, listens to Juliette Greco records, and dreams of Paris. These are things her over-bearing father, Jack (Alfred Molina) looks down upon since they “aren’t on the Oxford curriculum.” Then, while waiting in the rain at a bus stop after orchestra practice, a man pulls up. He tells her that he knows her mother told her not to take rides from strange men but that as a lover of cellos he couldn’t let hers be damaged in the rain. And with that, David enters Jenny’s life.
What follows are myriad concerts, jazz clubs, and art shows. David introduces Jenny to everything she has longed for and even manages to charm Jenny’s parents into letting him take her out, which points out an interesting hypocrisy within the film. Jenny can be forgiven for wanting to be with a charming, older David, but what kind of parents a allow a thirty year old man to take their 16-year old daughter out? They are simply wooed by David’s success and money, hoping to marry Jenny off to him, and disregard their previous focus on her education. Unlike many films where only the child demonstrates a naïve outlook, “An Education” points a finger at the naïve attitude of the parents, who seems more than willing to marry off their daughter to a mysterious older man so that she (as well as they) may climb the social ladder.
But soon, things start to spiral downwards. Jenny stops trying in school and destroys her previous academic success, despite the pleas of teacher Ms. Stubbs (Olivia Williams), who gives a subtlety skilled performance as a voice of reason and proof that one can be an individual without the glitz of night clubs and Paris. She is the one character who displays a true desire to see Jenny succeed, pleading with her, “to go to Oxford, no matter what. Because if you don’t you’ll break my heart.” Academy award winning actress Emma Thompson (Sense and Sensibility, Stranger than Fiction) makes a cameo as the school’s hard-nosed headmistress, who deals Jenny an ultimatum if she doesn’t straighten out. Though a quick role, Thompson expertly delivers the stern English view on life and education that personified the early sixties.
David becomes a less likeable character, due to his vague, mystery shrouded job as well as his constant lies to Jenny’s parents to get her to be able to go places with him. However, as Jenny heads for her ultimate crash, you never say to yourself, “Wow, she’s dumb for doing that.” She simply gets swept up in all the chic, all the glamour, of the world David offers.
However, my one gripe with the movie is the ending. It feels too generic compared to the rest of the film. It’s not that it was a bad ending; it’s just that it feels underdeveloped. It feels as if the writer’s ran out of time, and went with the quickest thing they could think of. If another 20 minutes had been added, it would have made a considerable difference to the overall quality of the film.
In short, “An Education” is a solid film that effectively portrays a girl’s struggle to find her own path in life, trying each of the proverbial “beds” to find which one is “just right.”
