An Education

Actor/Actress	Character
Peter Sarsgaard	David
Olivia Williams	Miss Stubbs
Sally Hawkins	Sarah
Carey Mulligan	Jenny
Alfred Molina	Jack (Jenny's Father)
Cara Seymour	Majorie (Jenny's Mother)
Emma Thompson
Directed by	Lone Scherfig
Rated PG-13
95 minutes

Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is a smart 16-year-old schoolgirl, prepping for Oxford and yearning for the sophisticated world of adulthood, but stuck in a bourgeois family in a bourgeois London suburb in a bourgeois decade (well, it’s 1961, but it still feels like the '50s.) She listens to French records and goes to French movies and sprinkles her conversation with French philosophers and French phrases, and aches for the day she can get the hell out into the real world and smoke French cigarettes and really laisse les bon temps rouler.
Her chance comes sooner than she expects. One afternoon, in a scene that could have inspired the Hollies hit Bus Stop five years later, she's standing with her cello in the rain near her school waiting for a bus when handsome fellow driving a red Bristol swings over and offers her cello a lift. He turns out to be David (Peter Saarsgard), a cool customer twice her age, with money and excitement to burn.

Where that money comes from isn't exactly clear. "Oh, buying and selling, this and that," he replies shiftily when she asks him what kind of work he does, and while that may cut it with a schoolgirl, even a bright one, it doesn't pull the wool over the eyes of a movie audience. But he's a charmer, the sort of born salesman who could sell suspenders to Ghandi, and after picking up Jenny it doesn't take him long to charm the socks off her dull parents, Jack (Alfred Molina) and Marjorie (Cara Seymour). He talks them into letting her go out with him to a concert and for a late supper afterward with his aunt. There is a concert, there isn't an aunt. But he gets her home when he's promised, and when her mother asks how her evening was, Jenny answers "It was the best night of my life," and you know she means it.

David is a virtuoso at spinning lies, and it's not long before he's conning Jenny's parents into letting her go away for weekends with him, even to Paris. Jack buys eagerly into the con, with a willing suspension of disbelief – it quickly becomes clear that his Oxford aspirations for his daughter have nothing to do with an education, and everything to do with trolling in the waters where the rich potential husbands swim. With a live prospect on the line, why waste time and money on Oxford?

There is a sense of creepiness in watching a young girl drifting toward a net of loss of sexual innocence with an older man. If it were two teenagers fooling around we wouldn't feel it so keenly, and if these two were each ten years older we wouldn't bat an eye, but there is something predatory and disturbing about the pairing of 30 and 16. But Jenny, dazzled and delighted though she is by David's attention, and by the world of cocktails and art auctions and jazz clubs and dog tracks he opens to her, is no sexual pushover. On their first night alone together, she gives him good news and bad news.
The bad news: she has decided not to relinquish her virginity until she's 17. The good news: her birthday is only a few weeks off.
And for all David's years and smoothness and experience, when it comes to sex Jenny has an innate sophistication that reduces the older man to an insecure fumbler and puts her in control. The deed is done in Paris, and afterward she gazes wistfully out over the fabled rooftops of the City of Light and sighs "All that poetry, and all those songs…about something that lasts no time at all."

The centerpiece of An Education is the breakout performance of young Carey Mulligan, who has been much compared to Audrey Hepburn. She is enchanting, and almost convincing as the teenage Jenny, though she can't completely obscure the (justified) suspicion that she's in her twenties and old enough for David. Sarsgaard is marvelous, thoroughly believable as an Englishman, and a troublingly human mixture of good and bad, suave and sleazy, confident and insecure. The rest of the cast is terrific as well. Molina overplays the awkwardness of his first meeting with David, but otherwise is in top form, and Emma Thompson is dry and tart as a lemon biscuit as the bigoted headmistress of Jenny's school. Also wonderful to watch are Rosamund Pike as a dumb blonde, Dominic Cooper as David's handsome, shady friend, and Olivia Williams as an understanding teacher. Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky) shines in a small but pivotal role.

An Education is based on a memoir by British journalist Lynn Barber, who traveled Jenny's road as a teenager. The story was adapted by novelist Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, About a Boy) and Danish director Lone Sherfig (Italian for Beginners), and they've done a great job until the last act, when it all gets a little too gift-wrapped and tied up with pretty ribbon.