(This review also appears on Filmleaf.)

MULLIGAN, SARSGAARD, AND THE BRISTOL

Pre-Swinging London made easy -- too easy

The young Carey Mulligan is sprightly and charming and does look a bit like Audrey Hepburn in this period drama about a bright, pretty 16-year-old suburban London schoolgirl who with a show of reserve gives in to the seduction, cultural and sexual, of David Goldman (Peter Sarsgaard), a thirty-something man of dubious intent and questionable livelihood. He's a smiling gangster, really, though the storytelling shows some skill in revealing the ugliness only in little gradual bits until bam! Comes the big shocker. Not that, by then, it's much of a surprise.

David rescues Jenny (Ms. Mulligan) and her cello from a heavy downpour -- already his sleek purple Bristol car is a strong hint of his subtle mixture of poshness and sleaze -- and before she can say "I'm a virgin" he's taking her to classical concerts, auctions of Burne-Jones paintings, and jazz clubs with free-flowing champagne. With them are David's cohort and "business partner" Danny (Dominic Cooper) and Danny's dumb blonde girlfriend Fanny (Rosamund Pike). Danny's sleeker and more handsome than David and where he lives is packed with handsome artworks. We don't see where David lives, and when we do, we find out why.

Helen, who's never read a book, let alone Camus, exists to set off Jenny's intelligence and would-be sophistication. Jenny listens to Juliette Greco's smoky chansons, gratuitously spouts French, quotes the French existentialist, and dreams of Paris -- anything to escape this dull country (which has not begun to swing yet, since its only 1961). She's not so good at Latin, but at her girl's school her literature teacher Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams) appreciates her and wants passionately for her to go to "read English" at Oxford, a phrase the film explains so insistently you'd think academic British were a completely foreign language too.

What's a bit hard to believe in this otherwise routine tale, based on a memoir by writer Lynn Barber and turned into an easy-to digest screenplay by Nick Hornby, is the way Jenny's parents go along with the idea of David, this mysterious and oily older man, taking their college-prep daughter off to fancy watering places unchaperoned; he tells a string of lies to soften them up, some of them unbelievably crude, like his remark when first introduced to Jenny's mom, "You didn't tell me you had a sister." This compliance is justified by the fact that for her mother Marjorie (Cara Seymour) and timid but bumptuous dad Jack (Alfred Molina), marriage to a man with money, which David evidently has, wherever it comes from, is as good as going to university, maybe better. In any case, Jenny doesn't keep any of what's going on a secret; in fact she boasts of it to her classmates, and the teachers know too. The only sign that all morals haven't been relaxed yet is the headmistress (a wasted Emma Thompson), who sees Jenny as disqualifying herself for Oxford, the school, or respectable life.

Carey Mulligan blooms before our eyes in this movie, and it's worth watching for that. There's a squirmy pleasure in observing her scenes with Peter Sarsgaard, and David is a good role for him. This is a character who is always acting so if Sarsgaard never seems natural that well fits the part. The whole trouble with An Education is that everybody gets off too easy. David, whose declared Jewishness almost seems like evil type-casting, is a thoroughly despicable person when we really get to know him: how come he just gets to slither away? Jenny never suffers any lasting ill effects of her misbehavior even though everybody knows about it. Conflicting morals in early Sixties England are never a hardship for her or well dramatized in Hornby's simplistic plot. She's never confused, and it all turns out just fine. Good for her, but it leaves one with a queasy feeling not only because of the reptilian behavior of the boyfriend but because consequences are simply ignored, unlike in the much more hardscrabble film about a young girl's virginity actually made in 1961, Tony Richardson's fine A Taste of Honey (written by Shelagh Delaney). How can Jenny be a heroine, if she has no real challenges to face? This doesn't feel like 1961 London, after all. It's just another modern take on a sassy young woman's premature liberation.

©Chris Knipp 2010