Being a seventeen-year-old girl is never easy. The pressures of getting accepted to the right college are always looming overhead. Boys are always on the mind, as is the looming concept of womanhood. It’s the time when the real lessons – not math or science, but growing up and maturing – are taught, whether we all like them to or not.
In An Education, our young protagonist, Jenny Miller (played by newcomer Carey Mulligan), must deal with suburban London in the early 1960’s, her stuffy private school and her overbearing parents, played to hilarious effect by Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour. Her academic goal is acceptance into Oxford, but she rebels against the social norm by sneaking cigarettes, listening to French music and dreaming of traveling the world.
Her dreams seem to come true when she encounters handsome and dashing David (Peter Sarsgaard) while waiting for a bus in a rainstorm. Claiming to be a music lover, David proposes that she load her cello into the back of his car while she walks alongside. The scene is hilarious and awkward, an adorable meet-cute situation that blooms into a devastating relationship.
David is everything Jenny wants (money, freedom and fun) and everything society wants to keep away from her (he’s nearly twice her age and a Jew). He brings her to art auctions and concerts and Paris, but there is a devious mystery to the man – he lies to her parents to get her to come with him on his trips and seems to have hidden agendas at every turn.
His friends Danny and Helen (Dominic Cooper and Rosamund Pike) are elegant and wealthy, but clearly know more than Jenny does. Her parents are just as swept away by David as Jenny is, but her kind schoolteacher (Olivia Williams) and stern headmistress (Emma Thompson) try to reel her back to reality and usher her off to Oxford and a respectable existence.
The movie offers plenty of humor – Molina is especially funny and lovable as a father stressed by the expenses of tuition, and Pike’s Helen is a delightful airhead – but there is a constant uneasiness floating with every frame. Sarsgaard’s David is charming and cool (and can pull off a yummy British accent), yet his exit in the finale is not entirely out of character.
The real gem here is Mulligan, previously known to American audiences as a younger sister in Pride and Prejudice and in the popular Doctor Who episode “Blink.” We rejoice with Jenny when she finally gets to go to Paris and we feel her hurt and confusion with every lie and betrayal David and his friends force upon her. She’s a wonder of an actress and is cute as a button.
An Education’s only real fault seems to lie with the ending, which I perceived as too tidy. The rest of the movie is a treat of a learning experience, as we watch Jenny’s sudden transformation from a naïve schoolgirl into a wise young woman.
