An Education
Whenever I see a screenplay due out by Nick Hornby, I am always anticipating a smart, funny and more often than not, an ostensibly British cinematic experience. An Education is no different in this respect as it delightfully plunges the viewer into the London suburbs of the 1960’s and introduces us to sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, Jenny, played quite charmingly and sweetly by Carey Mulligan, 24.
Being educated at a private school and heading directly for Oxford to read English (“English books? Going to read books?”) Jenny is smart and has her head screwed on. She knows what she wants and the best way to get there. Her parents don’t understand her, a fact of which she is not surprised and is reaching the stage in her life where boys a becoming tiresome chore as what she lacks in years, she makes up for in an almost wisened knowledge of their advances that belie her age.
And so their blossoming romance develops, slowly. Jenny, in her own inimitable fashion has already decided the day she wants to lose her virginity and it is to happen on her seventeenth birthday. She considers this during a conversation with Helen, assuming that David will, of course be the man she loses it to.
Lone Scherfig has developed a homely, comfy Home Counties tale from the memoirs of Lynn Barber here that will put any middle-class viewer of a certain age right at home, The familiarity of the domestic bliss in which the admittedly naive Jenny has grown up in is comforting, as is the love of her parents, whether she agrees with them or not on most things. It is through their care for her that she becomes the young, confident woman she is.
All of the performances a very well delivered. With Jenny, Mulligan has created a strong, but ultimately misguided young slip of a thing with ideologies and reams that would at first appear to be unrealistic and unlikely to be realised. Sarsgaard’s David is charming and apparently genuine, but comes across as both furtive and ever so slightly insidious on more than one occasion.
This is until her head is turned by the suave and sophisticate older man, represented here by David, played by Peter Sarsgaard. He stops in his sports car next to the bus stop where Jenny is waiting in the rain and offers her a lift. Smart enough to know better she dumps her cello in his car and walks alongside, for about a minute before joining him in the dry. And so she is trapped, or at least in the web and now unwaringly susceptible to the inevitable.
David‘s intentions appear honourable however and after a quick conversation, with no promise of any further contact between them, they part company. But as you can imagine, this is not the end of their story.
We meet David’s friends Danny (Dominic Miller) and ditzy but beautiful Helen (Rosamund Pike) when Jenny and David first go to a musical recital together. No mean feat to achieve in itself as David has to overcome the almost Victorian virtues of Jenny’s father, played reliably by Alfred Molina.
The rest of the cast, from Miller and Pike through to a great but brief turn from Emma Thompson as Jenny’s Headmistress are all well realised and having met most of these characters in one form or another in my time on the planet, I can happily say that most of them are pretty much on the button.
In all, an interesting study of a young girl’s racing advancement to adulthood, facing a host of difficult hurdles along the way and at the same time , developing a truer understanding that not all people are what they seem at face value. Like the cast, charming, sweet with a attention to detail that does indeed bear close scrutiny.
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