An Education

An Education (Scherfig, 2009) - ***1/2

From an era when candy from strangers was readily accepted.

Direct, breezly, and possessed of a remarkable economy of movement and speech, An Education, based on Lynn Barber's same-titled memoir, can easily deceive a viewer into thinking it’s a simple film. But far from it; this latest entry into the English-speaking West’s growing obsession with the tail of the post-WWII era, picking the scabs of repression and enforced order that would soon erupt into cultural and economic fissures that continue to hiss and steam (Mad Men, Revolutionary Road, A Serious Man, to name just a handful), is a dense and difficult fable that, like A Serious Man, portrays a lot of events that, on the surface, leave very little actually changed. But like A Serious Man’s oncoming storm, what we’re seeing is the last desperate attempts to preserve a social order that is collapsing under its own weight.

Behold, man's greatest Erector set.

Jenny (Carey Mulligan, fantastic) is a cello-playing spiretly young middle-class English student who loves to share her fluency and feels stifled by her father’s monomaniacal desire for her to attend Oxford; when charming older Jew David (Peter Saarsgard, ibid) leverages a ride home into what is at first a sweet seduction, Jenny leaps at the opportunity to be treated like a woman. That the relationship won’t end happily isn’t a surprise; what is surprising is how little is made of Jenny’s virginity, and how easily her father (Alfred Molina) acquiesces to an alternate route to securing his daughter stability and wealth, treating his daughter less like a precious flower to protect than an investment property to leverage.


Fine, but I want that reliever with the funky delivery and two players to be named later.

As Brendon Bouzard insightfully notes, An Education achieves the lamentably rare feat of “incorporat[ing] an incredible amount of stylistic goo-gaws, but…in service of the narrative.” With fascinating near-cameos from Emma Thompson as the curiously vile headmistress and Olivia Williams refracting her role from Rushmore, the film is most remarkable at its inability to avoid judgment or punishment, either in plot or style. The real question the film asks is in its very last line of voice-over, one that knifes its seemingly unearned conclusion, and one that asks just what a person’s soul is worth when society considers the rest of them a commodity.