An Education (2009)
An Education(BRIT) Directed by Lone Scherfig Written by Nick Hornby Starring Carey Mulligan; Peter Skarskaard; Alfred Molina; Cara Seymour; Olivia Willimas; Emma Thompson; Dominic Cooper; Rosemund Pike
Movies - or, at least those intended for a mass commercial market, have historically depended on casting actors who are well known to the paying public. Often the very films themselves are based around the on screen persona these leading men and women have established throughout their careers, with producers and studios depending on this symbiotic relationship between stars and their audiences. It’s nice then to view a bigger film headed by an actor who was previously unknown to most ticket buyers - even better when the actor highlighted is one who seems so obviously destined for a long and successful career
The actor in question, and centerpiece of An Education, is one Carey Mulligan, a fresh faced twenty four year old Brit who has done most of her previous work on the English stage and in television. Playing precocious sixteen/seventeen year old high school student Jenny, Mulligan looks appropriately young, and is fittingly brimming with dewy-eyed eagerness, underpinned emotion, and energy. One is struck by the notion of an actor being perfectly cast.
Directed by fifty year old female Dane Lone Scherfig (Italian for Beginners), An Educationis based on journalist Lynn Bolber’s slim memoir, which detailed her romantic relationship with an older man. Set in 1961, still the beginning of the famed mod period in London, the screenplay is by novelist Nick Hornby (High Fidelity; About a Boy), who took the basics of the source material (which was originally published in the literary journal Granta) and ran with it.
While Mulligan’s presence dominates the film, the rest of the cast is also excellent: Peter Skarsgaard (as Jew David Goldman) does a British variation on his usual semi-creepy guy; Alfred Molina is Jenny’s working class father Jack; Cara Seymour, Mom Marjorie; Emma Thompson, the Headmistress of her all girls school; Olivia Williams, her English teacher, Miss Stubbs; Dominic Cooper, David’s rich, art-collecting/playboy friend Danny; and Rosamund Pike, his vacuous, beautiful blond girlfriend Helen.
Though the coming of age aspect of the story may be far from novel, Jenny’s internal life is nicely and subtly evoked. Cello playing, Francophile Jenny longs to attend Oxford to read English, but she is aware that regardless of what lies in the offing there is little available for her professionally besides the promise of teaching at an all girls school like the one she attends. A neophyte aesthete with a youthful pretentious streak, Jenny loves art, literature, music, and film, but desires experiences that, at her age and station, are well beyond the reach of modest suburban London Twickendam.
Thankfully, the film avoids pandering to us or to Jenny’s character by delivering a reasonably rounded portrait of a young woman in the process of trying to grow in a conservative, repressive era when women were afforded little in the way of life choices, and her journey reflects the kinds of mistakes that are an inherent part of this maturation process. If she is exploited (and there is most definitely an uncomfortable sexual component to the story due to her age), then she at least partially complicit, so desperate is she to discover all that life has in store, regardless of (and perhaps even because of) the narrow path she has been told is her destiny.