Review

Review Date: 8-November-09
Spoiler Rating: High
Juju Judgment: Juicy

An Education (2009)

Lone Scherfig's highly watchable film An Education tells a coming-of-age story with an ambiguous conclusion. It seems to say that it is natural to lose your innocence and wise up, but this does not make the way any clearer. The recipient of this lesson is Jenny, a bright teenager who lives with her parents in London. Urged by her father (Alfred Molina), she is on a straight and narrow path towards Oxford where she hopes to major in English while indulging a neglected bohemian side. A few months before applying to university, however, she meets David (Peter Sarsgaard, typically excellent). He is several years older but shares her interests in art and music. He fires her desire for excitement and sophistication and therefore requires minimal courting to make her his girl. Most of his courting, in fact, is directed at her parents, whom he wins over just as easily.

Jenny is played by newcomer Carey Mulligan, and she embodies the young woman's foolishness, intelligence, and longing equally well. For all her assets, Jenny has the handicap of being female in the 1960s, which is presented as a bleak prospect. The headmistress and English teacher at her prep school regard their work as an act of defiance against the tradition that girls should be taught only attractiveness and homemaking. This appears to have taken its toll since they have a decidedly bitter, spinsterish air about them. By contrast, David introduces Jenny to his feckless friends Danny (Dominic Cooper) and Helen (Rosamund Pike), the latter of whom is an ignoramus with the single purpose of looking good on a man's arm. Jenny soon faces the choice of being pretty, carefree, and admired or maintaining an austere lifestyle to safeguard her independence. Her father's (ultimately empty) insistence on achievement has promoted her black-and-white outlook, but her new experiences offer no happy medium or alternative to selling out or missing out.

The grim view of Jenny's options is offset by the movie's humor (Dad and Helen bear a touch of the buffoon) and the fact that the choice is finally made for her by a chance discovery. All along Jenny ignores red flags that pop up about David's character, like anybody intoxicated with life and love, until at last they can be ignored no longer. Her eleventh-hour awakening is undoubtedly fortuitous, yet it cannot be called a happy ending. One can only hope that Jenny's education with David and down the road leads to something more fulfilling than what every other woman in the movie has attained.

Copyright © 2009 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.