Clever, realistic and well developed, ""An Education"" investigates how to acquire diverse types of knowledge, and examines how much one person can sacrifice in pursuit of it.In 1961 London, 16-year-old Jenny (Carey Mulligan), is a brilliant yet bored student preparing to apply to Oxford. A beautiful girl with lofty standards, she has high school suitors who could never hope to measure up to her abilities (one helplessly bumbles over a simple French phrase she coyly mentions). Enter David (Peter Sarsgaard), a cultured but uneducated man twice her age, who offers her a ride home one day. A relationship blossoms between them as David opens up a new world to Jenny, taking her to chamber concerts, jazz clubs and art galleries.
Despite her intellect, Jenny's surprising naïveté is evident in her dream of being whisked away from the bourgeois bore she perceives to be her life. This dream is partially fulfilled when David handily persuades Jenny's parents that he can both guide their daughter culturally and assist her financially. Jenny's parents ultimately decide that this sort of education may be more beneficial to Jenny than any school could provide.
Take one glance at the couple, and their wide age difference is more than apparent, which might sound alarms in most parents' heads today. Director Lone Scherfig however, takes this coming-of-age love story in a lighter fashion, and the film's characters oddly don't dwell on this fact. ""High Fidelity"" author Nick Hornby's screenplay adaptation from Lynn Barber's memoir was occasionally far-fetched in this way: Jenny's parents give an unreasonably supportive reaction to meeting their 16-year-old daughter's 30-something boyfriend.
More often than not, however, the screenplay trusts that its audience has a certain amount of maturity, and can deduce the film's narrative subtext. In many movies today, certain plot elements are prepared by seemingly subtle details in dialogue, gestures, props or setting.
Here, the viewer makes discoveries alongside Jenny through these kinds of visual cues, despite little enforcement from the dialogue. Revelations made in the film are definitively surprising, as opposed to the context clues that are usually present in the ""twists"" of contemporary film.
The film's principal exploration is that of its title, the definition of an education. Is it obtained through an academically rigorous courseload? Worldly travels and cultural experiences? Making the wrong choice and living with the consequences? These are questions that are presented but not answered, by the film.
Though these greater questions are left unanswered, general thematic elements conclude with no loose ends, which takes away some of the realism the first half of the film tried so hard and achieved.
Mulligan gives a stunning performance as the impressionable Jenny, emitting a dazzling wit and Audrey Hepburn-like charm. A close second is Sarsgaard as the slyly cultured, borderline creepy David, whose eagerness to expose Jenny to high culture—among other things—does not waver.
Although the film's second half cleans up a bit too nicely, its convictions are nonetheless powerful. And though most characters had the best of intentions, it's unclear whether any of them were right.This resonating ambiguity manages to leave the right questions unanswered.
Grade: AB
