An Education

Here’s the thing about an An Education: it’s a good film, even a very good film – one that deftly reclaims the idea of the 1960s and reshapes it into something fresh and unexpected. But that’s not why you should see it. You should see it because this is the film that introduces the world to Carey Mulligan.

Back in January, Mulligan’s star power ignited the Sundance Film Festival, making her the new hot ticket of indie cinema. The 24-year-old British actress paid her dues doing costume drama (Bleak House, Pride & Prejudice) and Saturday night kitsch (Doctor Who), but here she makes the move from small screen to large with effortless grace. That’s one small step for her, one giant leap for a new generation of young British actors.

She plays 16-year-old Jenny, a youthful incarnation of Observer journalist Lynn Barber, whose autobiographical memoir has been reconstructed by director Lone Scherfig and writer Nick Hornby. That memoir was a stark self-appraisal of innocence lost that begins in the modest surroundings of suburban Twickenham in 1961.

Carey Mulligan makes the move from small screen to large with effortless grace. That’s one small step for her, one giant leap for a new generation of young British actors.

This is England, post-war but pre-liberation, before the ’60s started to swing. This is a decade stripped of pretensions by a Danish director with an outsider’s eye. Here, on the rain-soaked fields of a fallen empire, everything is stuck in the mud – from a lacrosse ball chased through swollen puddles, to the hopes and dreams of a generation trapped somewhere between the old and the new.

But Jenny has the stirrings of impetuous confidence that will come to define the decade. She aces essays on Jane Eyre in her prim girls’ school, and holds forth in a café on the merits of Camus. “Feeling,” she says, “is bourgeois.” But as in Jane Eyre, passion and practicality will collide, and by the end of the film the rash arrogance and bold certainty of youth will have been cruelly exposed and sadly undone.

Playing Mr Rochester to her Jane is David (Peter Sarsgaard), an older man whose Bristol sports car and dark glasses mark him out as an impossibly exotic creature. Charming and urbane, David sweeps Jenny off her feet with outlandish displays of sophistication (he takes her to ‘supper’, something that Jenny and her friends have heard of but never eaten); introducing her to his dashing friends, Helen (Rosamund Pike) and Danny (Dominic Cooper); and providing a whiff of danger with his shady business dealings.

It’s not just Jenny who is seduced. Set against this new life of discovery – fine art auctions, weekends in Oxford, a trip to Paris – is Jenny’s home life, brilliantly anchored by Alfred Molina as her uptight dad. Here, DP John de Borman dials down the light, accentuating the flat, period production design of Andrew McAlpine. David dazzles in these darkened spaces, spinning tall stories to Jenny’s wide-eyed parents, casually charming his way into the family with easy confidence and fluid lies.

Barber’s memoir is as much her parents’ story as her own – their failure to see through David cast as a betrayal of their daughter. But the film takes a more sympathetic view of the fear and self-loathing of the middle classes, staring into the face of tumultuous change. “All my life I’ve lived in fear,” admits Molina – the fear of his own limitations passed on to his children like a genetic disease.

Their failure is a lesson that every child has to learn – that your parents are no less fallible, no less gullible than you are. But the inevitability of that lesson doesn’t make it any less painful. Especially for Jenny, once so secure in her own sophistication, now so ashamed of being foolish, but even more ashamed of being forgiven.

These are the scenes in which Mulligan excels; giving wonderful clarity to Jenny’s inner life. Scherfig has the sense and the confidence to shoot her in close-up, allowing us to absorb the nuances of the performance. Mulligan’s pixy beauty will draw comparisons to Audrey Hepburn, and it’s no exaggeration to say that she can live with them.

Filtered through Jenny’s delighted eyes, this familiar era comes alive, seeming new and exciting even to an audience saturated with images and memories of the decade. Mulligan’s command of her features is extraordinary – the slightest widening of the mouth, the merest twitch of an eyebrow, the tiny parting of her lips, all perfectly capturing Jenny’s mixture of knowing and naivety.

In contrast, Peter Sarsgaard struggles in a role for which he’s singularly ill suited, lacking both the charisma and the accent to convince as David. His casting is a frustrating mistake when there’s any number of English actors who would have done a better job. Not least Dominic Cooper.

Then again, in An Education the men play second fiddle to the women. Jenny’s relationships with the women in her life define her every bit as much as her doomed romance with David. As her mother, Marjorie, Cara Seymour’s quiet performance swings between pride and panic – the hopes and fears of a woman desperately trying to understand her young daughter but totally lacking the faculties to do so (in her memoir, Barber bitterly recalled her mother’s ‘beta brain’).

Emma Thompson is superb as the headmistress warning Jenny of the consequences of her newfound rebellious streak. But her air of authority is fatally undermined by her failure to answer Jenny’s simple, searching question: faced with a choice between fun and boredom, why should she give up so much for so little? Even so, Thompson gets the film’s signature line, replying to Jenny’s concerns that she must consider her a ‘ruined woman’. “Oh no,” she says, “I don’t think you’re a woman at all.”

But Jenny’s conflict is most keenly felt through the twin influences of her teacher, Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams), and David’s friend Helen. Miss Stubbs, with her scraped back hair and thick black glasses, her pursed lips and her Cambridge education, represents everything that Jenny used to want and has come to despise. Helen, by contrast, is a beautiful, vacuous vessel. But both, in their way, will confound Jenny’s prejudices. It is Helen who effortlessly skewers Jenny’s intellectual pretensions and teaches her, paradoxically, to be herself. Miss Stubbs, similarly, will show Jenny that looks can be deceiving.

If it all ends a bit too neatly (with a fatuously scored montage straight out of the Richard Curtis playbook), Barber’s own story really did end on an uplifting beat. What began as a tale of innocence lost ends with a sense of exciting discovery. Because the lesson to take away from An Education is that a new star has been found.

Matt Bochenski

Anticipation:

All the talk from Sundance 2009 was of the discovery of a major new talent in the shape of Carey Mulligan.

Enjoyment:

The talk was right, although the film itself is lighter than expected.

In Retrospect:

An Education will be remembered as the launch pad of a new career, even after the memory of the film itself fades.