Education: A Right Career Move

**Warning–This review may contain spoilers**–’An Education’ is a film rife with one implausible character after another. For starters, when we’re introduced to the protagonist, high school student Jenny, she seems way too sophisticated for a 16 year old. The main problem is that Carey Mulligan, who plays Jenny, is 24 years old in real life. Why didn’t they cast a teenager?

Then there’s the problem of the girl’s father, Jack. At first he appears extremely petulant, a caricature of the pushy parent who wants their child to succeed at any cost. With his insistence that Jenny study night and day in order to get into Oxford, we’re first led to believe that he’s the film’s antagonist. But soon when con-artist David appears on the scene, Jack is suddenly reduced to unprincipled buffoon. I say buffoon because he’s so easily taken in by David’s scheme–that David is actually an Oxford alumni and knows famous Oxford professor/author C.S Lewis. If this was a real character, wouldn’t have Jack made a few simple inquiries to determine whether David was telling the truth or not?

In very simplistic fashion, the implication here is Jenny’s sudden embrace of a life of crime is due to Jack’s lack of principles. David basically buys Jack’s acquiescence in allowing Jenny’s trips away from home and ultimately accepting the idea of Jenny and David tying the knot. Somehow all this so easily rubs off on impressionable Jenny. The gutless father figure is nothing new–just think of Jim Backus strutting around in an apron in ‘Rebel without a cause’.

Perhaps the moment I found to be the most incredulous was Jenny’s sudden transformation from earnest student to unsavory bad girl. Even with the father acting the way he did, would she have so suddenly embraced David once she discovers that he’s a con artist? I would think that a normal teenager would have been very alarmed that she was now in the company of a bunch of criminals and fear would have entered into the equation. But what was Jenny’s reaction? A mild protest and then David sweeps her off her feet.

David was disappointing in that he was such a tame sociopath. What are his crimes? Well, he steals an antique map from a house that’s up for sale and arranges for minorities to move into apartment buildings, scaring elderly tenants, and then buying the apartments from them when they decide to leave, at cut-rate prices. Oh yes, he also cheats on his wife. Equally disappointing is the couple he hangs out with–except for one scene where there is a confrontation with Jenny, they really have little to do.

Every melodrama needs a villain and that is of course the headmistress of the school Jenny attends. After she finds out David is Jewish, she blurts out that the Jews “killed our Lord”. Not only is she depicted as a vile anti-Semite but she cruelly rejects Jenny’s request to be reinstated. Only Jenny’s kindly teacher is willing to give her encouragement.

There is nothing subtle about ‘An Education’. It’s an old-fashioned morality play where the good guys (educated professionals) triumph over shiftless petty criminals who hang out at such unsavory venues as dog tracks and seedy nightclubs. Everything is tied up in a nice ribbon at the end when both Jenny and her father repent and Jenny is miraculously accepted into Oxford.

‘An Education’ is a tawdry little tale that has already garnered a good share of undeserved accolades. It does boast a nice recreation of early 60s London along with a brooding score but in terms of psychological insight and depth of character, it totally lacks any kind of aesthetic credibility.
Rating: 2 / 5

A lushly photographed film that is both draggy and interesting. Very handsome and photogenic stars. Outside of the Middle East, it’s unusual to see a Jew openly portrayed as a scoundrel, and this is probably one of the unique aspects here. Also gives a nice feel for British private school life, family interactions, and social mores in the 1960’s.
Rating: 3 / 5

The year is 1961. Sixteen year-old Jenny (played by 24 year-old Carey Mulligan) is the star pupil in her English class and entertains hopes of one day attending Oxford college. This hope is encouraged by her teachers (one of which is played by the beautiful Olivia Williams who here downplays her beauty with plain clothes, no make-up, school marm bun, and thick glasses) and her parents and so her days are spent studying for exams. In her spare moments Jenny reads French literature and listens to French records. Jenny has no real problems or conflicts; she has supportive parents and teachers, talent, and plenty of friends. However, being an imaginative creature with tastes beyond her years, Jenny finds her routine suburban life of school and study dull. And like many teenagers, precocious or not, she feels stifled by those who only want the best for her. Only one boy expresses interest in her and he is an immature and restless dreamer who wants to travel to mainland Europe (not unlike Jenny herself)but he can never find the right thing or anything to say and he bores the very articulate and quick-witted Jenny. One day while Jenny waits for a bus in the rain a stranger (Peter Sarsgaard) offers to give her a lift. Because he can actually hold an adult conversation and thus her attention, Jenny is attracted to the much older David. When he asks her out several days later, she eagerly accepts.

The film is based on a memoir by Lynn Barber and adapted for screen by Barber and Nick Hornby (who is best known for his novel High Fidelity). Danish director Lone Scherfig has an eye for period details (cars, fashion, furnishings) that give this film an authenticity often lacking in many other period films. This year–situated as it is at the beginning of one of the most transformative decades in western history–seems to be a particularly well chosen one in which to set this portrait of Jenny and middle-class English society since both are just beginning to test the waters of those changes to come. This transitional moment (in that limbo between 1950’s conservatism and 1960’s liberalism) seems to be getting a lot of attention in film of late. I suspect this is because this tension between conservative traditionalism and permissive liberalism is still being played out in our personal and social lives. We have plenty of films that criticize the 1950’s for being stifling, kitschy, and counterfeit; and plenty of films that claim that the 1960’s supposedly liberated us from those inauthentic and materialistic norms. What we don’t have are many films that take a more measured look at this transitional period (just how much has the world changed and just how much have those pesky norms persisted?) or this transitional time in life (what exactly is an education?). This film takes a measured look at both.

The cars, the furniture, the fashion, the jazz records, the paintings, the cigarettes at first appear to be there merely to provide background and atmosphere but of course background and atmosphere are important when they are the things that are seducing the main character. The real love story here is not between Jenny and David but between Jenny and culture. Thats what really creates and holds the viewer’s interest, thats what’s really being documented by Barber’s memoir and this film. The real event of Jenny’s seventeenth birthday is not the loss of her viriginity, but the contact she makes with live Jazz, and Paris (not the dream of it but the actual place): these are what she falls in love with ,and, consequently, what facilitate her rapidly evolving sense of self. Our characters are formed, Jenny’s teachers and books say, from our experiences. However, the teachers themselves, Jenny is quick to note, do not appear to have had much firsthand experience of the world. Her teachers all try to warn Jenny about David because they all assume that the relationship is distracting her from what really matters, Oxford. But Jenny is still discovering what really matters to her. And she questions the value of an education that is so narrowly focused on book learning and the acquisition of advanced degrees. Certainly one thing that David introduces Jenny to is sexuality but of all the things that he introduces her to that is perhaps the least interesting to her. Sexuality–that much-heralded liberator of so many 1960’s films–is all but absent from this film, the intimate scenes are brief non-events; sexuality, Jenny finds, is not much of a teacher, nor a liberator (the poets, it would seem to Jenny, have overstated the importance of the act). What Jenny really finds liberating is firsthand experience, and what experience teaches her is what matters most to her and what matters most to those around her. What she finds matters most to her parents is not education but financial security (hers and theirs); and what she finds matters most to her teachers is book learning and degrees. The only people that seem to really care about and value experience and living are David and his friends. She envies their experience-rich lives, and they envy her natural talents; it is a two-way seduction. It is experience that teaches Jenny who Jenny is which is the biggest lesson of her early life. It is also experience that teaches her to look with more sympathetic eyes on the lives of others, especially on her teacher Miss Stubbs.

This brings me to what I thought was going to be a criticism of the film. At first I thought the film failed to develop Miss Stubbs and I thought this was a major flaw. But the more I think about it the more I suspect that this character is not undeveloped, just purposefully left ambiguous. In 1961 England an Oxford educated woman had two career options: teaching and civil service. The Miss Stubbs’ role is therefore extremely important as Miss Stubbs represents the kind of future that is available to and awaits Jenny if she is indeed accepted to Oxford. When Jenny looks at Miss Stubbs she is therefore also in many ways eyeing her own future. At first Jenny perceives Miss Stubbs to be frumpy and sexless and sad but like all of her other perceptions in this film that perception shifts. For most of the film we see Miss Stubbs as Jenny does–a schoolteacher with no personal life or identity apart from that role. When we finally do see her not at school but in her own home in her own clothes we see she is not exactly a beauty but not at all plain either. We do not know exactly what her life is like but we do know that she surrounds herself with the things she loves which happen to be the same things that Jenny loves. Since the Miss Stubbs character is left somewhat ambiguous, it is never made clear whether a life spent contemplating culture is a good life, a satisfying life, or not. It would seem that her life is highlighted by art but also lonely as it seems that she has no one to share those experiences with. Whether this is the life that Jenny sees herself living in ten or twenty years is unclear; what does seem clear is that both “women” (by films end Jenny does seem like she has begun to acquire the wisdom she has been seeking; by this films criteria it is wisdom and not sexuality that makes a woman) seem to have learned something from the other: Miss Stubbs, one suspects or at least hopes, will perhaps become more daring and seek connections with people and not just works of art, and Jenny will channel her curiousity and daring in more sophisticated and less naive ways.

This is a quiet film that does not necessarily make a strong immediate impact, but that nonetheless resonates days after viewing.
Rating: 4 / 5