AN EDUCATION

Director: Lone Scherfig
Stars: Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina, Dominic Cooper, Rosamund Pike, Olivia Williams, Cara Seymour
Year: 2009
Rating: PG-13

Starting off with a piece of fairly surprising trivia: An Education marks the first time in his fifteen-year career that Peter Sarsgaard has received top billing in a film. Considering Sarsgaard's impressive body of work, it seems a real injustice that such an accolade was this long in coming ... but boy, does Sarsgaard earn it here, in a wonderful, totally enchanting film in which Carey Mulligan not only shines as a British teenaged girl trying to get into Oxford in the early 1960's - she also shows the makings of a fine actress, worthy of the Oscar nomination she got for this film and a true star of the future.

Here Mulligan plays Jenny, a 16-year-old suburban British girl from Twickenham who, in 1961, dreams of little more than living the bohemian lifestyle in Paris one day, where she will wear all black, smoke incessantly, and absorb nothing but French music, literature, and culture. Her short-term goal, however, is to get into Oxford by passing her A-levels - a goal set by her parents, and in particular her father, Jack (Alfred Molina, in one of his best performances), who wants his daughter to be successful and self-sufficient. Jenny is bored, bored, bored, playing her cello (after years of lessons) and smoking behind the backs of her parents and teachers, and just biding her time until she can get away to university and start the life she really wants to lead.

Until, one day during a thunderstorm, Jenny meets David (Peter Sarsgaard) - a man nearly twice her age who loves music and can't stand the thought of Jenny's cello being ruined in the rain. David gives Jenny a ride home, and the two bond instantly over a love of the arts and culture - and a short time after, when Jenny is with her girlfriends from school and runs into David again, this time the older man asks her if she'd like to attend a concert with him and his best friends, Helen and Danny, later that week. At first Jenny declines, thinking there is no way her parents would let her go, so they make a bet that if he can talk her parents into saying it's okay she will go - otherwise, he will give Jenny the tickets for her and her mother to go, instead.

The night of the concert, David proves a master charmer and indeed talks Jack into practically suggesting David take Jenny himself. At the concert, Jenny meets David's friends - the beautiful, worldly, yet somehow vacuous Helen (Rosamund Pike) and her handsome boyfriend Danny (Dominic Cooper) - and from that night on, the four start spending a lot of time together around town, as David starts to woo Jenny, even as her parents think of it more as a nice young man trying to expose their daughter to new cultural and educational influences (this was the early sixties, remember; a somewhat more innocent time than today). Jenny, in turn, starts to fall for David, who eventually suggests they make her dream come true and go to Paris, just in time for her seventeenth birthday. Even after the luster wears off of David a bit - when Jenny finds out what he and his best friend/business partner Danny really do for a living, for one - Jenny still cannot deny that her world and life have both opened up in such beautiful and glorious ways; ways she never thought possibly except in her wildest fantasies come true.

An Education is a quiet, subtle and very affecting film that is not so easy to define, yet simple in both approach and story. Carey Mulligan, at times, is deeply reminiscent of a young Audrey Hepburn as Jenny, and her performance is so real you never for once see her as an actress in the film. Sarsgaard, as a character you never quite know if you can trust fully, is perfectly cast as David, with genuine chemistry and outright charm igniting the air between the two actors on-screen. Even as the relationship between Jenny and David deepens, you grow to wonder how things will work out, or if these two even should be together. More to the point, you will be rooting for Jenny all the way, whether you agree with her choices or not.

Ultimately, the film works on several levels in terms of the title alone. And while this is something most would probably call a "small" film in terms of budget, story and characters, it still makes quite and impact, mostly due to the amazing Carey Mulligan. She is the heart of the film, and the heart you'll want to protect as she breathes heart, soul, humor, and life into Jenny. What a treat of a performance, and what a treat of a film. **** - Reel Awesome