An Education Comes Close To Perfection: Inspired Casting And Performances

Literature is full of cautionary tales of innocent young women seduced by smooth-talking rakes. Jenny, a dutiful student and a passionate consumer of modern novels and French pop records, has surely encountered more than a few such stories. But at 16 and in a terrible hurry, she seems less inclined to learn from the mistakes of wayward romantic heroines than to join their ranks. “An Education” is rated PG-13. Its sexual implications are not as troubling as they should be.
　　
An Education is set in 1962, the heroine is 16-year-old London schoolgirl Jenny Miller (Carey Mulligan), the only child of conventional, lower-middle-class parents, and the film's title has a double meaning, one scholastic, the other sentimental. First, it refers to her sixth-form work at a Twickenham girls' school, the prize pupil of Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams), her intense English teacher, and the imminent prospect of winning a place at Oxford that will transform her life. It also refers to the dangerous relationship that begins when David (Peter Sarsgaard), a seemingly wealthy charmer, gives her a lift home in his Bristol sports car one rainy day and that threatens to deflect her disastrously from this liberating future.
　　
The world of the early 60s is well established: this period of Macmillan's "Never had it so good" Britain, immediately before 1963, that pivotal year apostrophised by Philip Larkin, when the Profumo scandal opened up to view a different, more corrupt nation, and the Beatles, the Stones and the great train robbers ushered in the swinging 60s and the permissive society.
　　
This turns out to be both foreseeable and surprising. Jenny makes no secret of her relationship with David, which becomes the talk of her school, attracting the concern of a sad, kindly young teacher (Olivia Williams) and the fierce disapproval of the headmistress (Emma Thompson, taking a practice run at her inevitable portrayal of Margaret Thatcher).
　　
But Jenny’s course is set. It’s not that she’s out of control — quite the contrary. She is deliberately and systematically, with what she imagines to be full knowledge of the consequences, seeking out what the vestigial Victorianism of her era would see as her ruin.
　　
And the era itself is the real subject of “An Education,” which catches Britain around the time when, as Philip Larkin put it in his famous poem, “sexual intercourse began.” There is a bit of that stuff in “An Education,” but it’s more the symbol of other kinds of experience than the reverse. What Jenny craves is not the fact of sex — though she does make sure to schedule the loss of her virginity — but full access to an ideal of sexiness, a world that is the opposite of the boring little England she knows and loathes. Even as David is taking advantage of her innocence, she is, at first unwittingly and then more brazenly, using him to find her way to that world, which she identifies especially with France.

The script is more sophisticated than this précis suggests—an Oscar-worthy effort by the able Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, About a Boy), who adapted the short memoir by Lynn Barber originally published in Granta magazine (and about to be republished with other writings in book form this fall). Danish director Lone Scherfig ( Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, Italian for Beginners) shows great affinity for the material, a director with a gift for making flawed characters likeable—everyone in the film, no matter how brief his or her part, comes across fully formed—and she gets the little things right. Jenny and her classmates read Penguin Classics in equally classic Tschichold-designed paperbacks; David sports blue serge with narrow lapels, neat pocket squares and too-jaunty trilbys, retrofitting Connery’s Bond with a dab of Niven’s; Jenny’s father, played alternately solicitous and supercilious by Alfred Molina, ties on a frilly apron to protect his pinstripes when helping with the dishes, a costume uncannily suited to his character. Cat’s-eye glasses, bouffant hairdos, patent-leather heels and pocketbooks seem stylish again: The film evokes the period with such affection, we wonder why we gave up nylons, skinny ties and cigarettes.
　　
Ironically, the most accomplished member of the ensemble, Emma Thompson, strikes the film’s only false notes, although it’s not her fault. As the sour headmistress of Jenny’s school, she stands in for the clichéd close-minded parochialism of Britain (and America) before the baby-boomers liberated both countries from the cultural doldrums. It’s a thankless, heavy-handed role and a bit of dreary pontification in a movie that easily could have lapsed into a full-length lecture on moral turpitude.
　　
Hornby and Scherfig, thankfully, eschew sententious sermonizing; in the end, everyone, including Jenny’s parents, conspires in her seduction, and ancient lessons are once again hard-learned. An Education drops a few parables (watch for the one about the money tree!), but the filmmakers allow us to draw our own conclusions about the action unfolding before us. If this tutorial on love and ambition closes with a too-pat ending, well, the pedagogy is happily free-form.