An Education

I was intrigued by this title back in 2009, especially after it garnered such high praise and received three Oscar nominations including best picture. Well I finally got around to watching it and have to say that I was...underwhelmed.

The film takes place in early 1960s London, where 16 year old Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is being kept firmly to the tracks towards Oxford by her very forceful father (Alfred Molina) and sympathetic but stern teachers. Yet while she studies hard and has a very nice disposition, it also becomes apparent quite quickly that this is not the life she wants to lead.

In steps David (Peter Sarsgaard), a 30-something year old who innocently drives up to her in the rain, offering to protect her cello in the car while she walks alongside. Soon enough she's charmed off her feet and climbs in herself, thus beginning a long saga of a rather creepy romance. He wines her, dines her, takes her out to parties with another 30-something couple, and even whisks her off to Paris and buys her everything she wants. But of course, David is not without his dark side, namely in his business dealings, but despite it all Jenny still loves him and gives up everything to be his.

Before I start deriding I do have to say that Mulligan and Sarsgaard are really wonderful in their respective roles. Mulligan carries a fierceness to her that shirks the role of the stereotypical young lady in love and gives a great deal of maturity and depth to a character that frankly probably shouldn't have it. Sarsgaard, for some reason, always creeps me out. Whether it's because he just normally goes after these kind of roles where he's not what he seems, or just because of the way he looks and talks, I don't know. But that creepiness works perfectly as this older man who very obviously has secrets and whom this young girl should very obviously not be with.

But that is also part of this movie's downfall. An Education makes itself out to be like a comedy/romance/coming of age story. Unfortunately, the story this movie actually tells is far from the genres is tries to fit into. Every scene that in a normal romance would be just fine carried this creepy quality to it that I just couldn't put aside, nor should the movie have tried to either. Perhaps it was just trying to emulate or explain how things were back in the day, but especially with what is revealed about David it's as if the movie is trying to fool us, just as Jenny and her family are fooled, into thinking that we're watching Pride and Prejudice.

Oh god, and her family. Poor Alfred Molina starts as the stereotypically brutish, stern 50s-era father who cares absolutely nothing for women's opinions, and then turns into a blubbering bashful idiot every time David is around. The pure lack of any concern over Jenny dating or marrying this much older man, and of her dropping out of school to do so, shows a remarkable lack of character continuity on the writer's part, especially when at the end he finally softens up to Jenny. The poor mother comes off even worse, being the absolutely stereotypical 50s repressed housewife who never talks and cleans until midnight but feels bad about it. They seemed almost cartoonish sometimes in how they were written.

So then I looked up the source of the story. It's from an autobiographical essay by a British journalist. And then it hit me. Of course they seem weirdly inconsistent and stereotypical. They're based on what a 16 year old girl thought of them at the time. Though I am surprised that now that she's older she didn't look back and think they must not have really been like that.

Maybe I'm getting it all wrong, and David really was just an amazingly smooth talker who could get what he wanted out of anyone, but in this movie it all just feels too unreal and inconsistent.

And then there's the ending. Shame on the screenwriter for that ending. SHAME. Those last five minutes honestly ruined the movie. I suppose it was meant to be a nice little tie-off where we see that life does go on and things end on at least a little bit of a happy note. But boy did it just go wrong. We go from this very dramatic scene where everything has fallen apart, to this weird, wholly unsatisfying little snippet where everything is okay now and she got into Oxford after all and she met other boys. The end. It takes whatever this movie was working toward and just throws it down an unfinished drain. It really feels like the screenwriter just ran out of time and decided to tack this thing on the end.

In short, An Education stands to its name, as it's a film to learn from. It takes all the things going for it, great costumes, a great setting, great actors, etc. and then shoves this screenplay onto them (which was nominated for an Oscar unbelievably) which takes the entirely wrong approach to its subject. It's almost maddening because one little thing could have fixed a lot of the problems I had: make it from Jenny's point of view. Then all the character discrepancies, all the complete ignorance, all the oddities of this movie would've made sense because we're only getting one character's view of the situation.

Yet despite my railing against it, I did actually enjoy the movie for the most part. Despite my frustrations, it was still, on the whole, a good film. It's just the odd choices made in the screenplay that mar it from actually being worthy of the Oscar nods it received (besides Mulligan's, she deserved that one).

An Education gets a 6.5/10.