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An Education (Film)
Rating: M
Running Time: 100
Country: UK
Director: Lone Scherfig
Cast: Carey Mulligan, Rosamund Pike, Peter Sarsgaard, Emma Thompson
Distributor: Paramount
Film Worth: $10.50
Release Date: October 22, 2009
Excellent performances from the entire cast don’t make up for the fact that this film is mostly a highly forgetful, stylish, soap inspired story.
Based on an autobiographical piece by English journalist Lynn Barber, and scripted by popular novelist Nick Hornby (Fever Pitch, About A Boy), this is a slick and seductive story, but rather less than the sum of its parts.
The setting is London and the time is 1961. It's pre-Beatles and pre-Swinging Sixties, and a stultifying time to be a bright and independent-minded teenager. Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl enamoured of French existentialism and the pre-Raphaelites. She hopes to go on to Oxford, and is bored rigid with the austerity and restrictions of both school and her family home. (Alfred Molina does a marvellous turn as her inept and irascible father.)
Then along comes the charming and thirty-ish David (Peter Sarsgaard). He's witty, friendly without being overtly predatory, and seems just erudite enough to be genuinely impressed with her mind as well as her looks. Best of all, he's got the contacts and the money to introduce her to the sophisticated world that she craves. David and Jenny go to art auctions, horse races, supper clubs, and hang out with his urbane friends. And as one of them reassures her, "You have taste - that's not half the battle, that's the whole war."
All this high living has the potential to damage Jenny's academic prospects, as well as prompting reactions ranging from disapproval to jealousy in those around her. Will life triumph over education? Is David a nice guy, or just an opportunistic slimeball? Such questions are the stuff of soap opera, and the film is essentially a stylised soapie with brains.
An Education is very forgettable, but it's droll and watchable enough.