Film review: An Education

Published on Friday 23 October 2009 16:49

AN EDUCATION **** (12A) Director: Lone Scherfig Running time: 95 minutes

THE curse of coming-of-age movies is that the hero is too often a passive receptor and, despite the hip oldies on the soundtrack, the result says nothing that dozens of previous coming-of-age movies haven't already.

An Education is a glorious exception. Based on journalist Lynn Barber's trenchant memoir, it stars Carey Mulligan as Barber aged 16, renamed Jenny and already a headstrong overachiever. Impatient with unFab 1961 Twickenham, she fancies herself more sophisticated than her friends, modelling herself on Juliette Greco, adding n'est-ce pas to her sentences at the drop of un chapeau.

Tethered to a home where it's pushing the boat out to unwrap the Battenberg cake, she sees university as her only escape from cello, homework and fussing parents Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour. In fact, her father seems more determined for her to get into Oxford than she is, examining everything she does through the filter of an admissions officer.

Then, during a downpour, another, smoother option pulls up beside her in a maroon Bristol and tells her that, while she shouldn't take a lift from a strange man, he can give her cello a lift in the car and she can walk alongside and chat. Innocuous compromises are a speciality of David (Peter Sarsgaard), who is smooth, seductive and nearly twice her age. Apparently rich in a slightly shady way, he offers a shortcut to glamour, travel and excitement, and Jenny's parents are easily charmed into letting him take her out for meals with his racy pals Danny (Dominic Cooper) and the gorgeous but fearsomely vacuous Helen (Rosamund Pike).

Nick Hornby's adaptation is funny, intelligent and bracingly unsentimental, especially when it comes to rites-of-passage clichs. Instead of the usual ecstatic sheet rummages, the film quickly cuts to the post-coitus couple, with Jenny noting: "All that poetry and all those songs about something that lasts no time at all." Nor is she oblivious to David's deceptions; in fact she colludes with him.

The only opposition to Jenny's new boyfriend comes from her teachers. Emma Thompson's tart headmistress has a touch of Thatcher battleship, while Jenny's kindly English teacher (Olivia Williams) hates to see her prize pupil throw away an education, only for Jenny to zing back that "It's not enough to educate us any more. You have to tell us why you're doing it."

This story is a cameo of a particular family at a particular time: London, the 1960s, lower-middle-class parents with a brilliant only daughter. Love was regulated. Jenny's parents were focused on hauling their daughter – and themselves – up a notch by the education rope.

Jenny's naivete eventually falls heavily upon her, although at no point does she completely cave in when her world crumbles. Instead the film suggests she has gained rather than lost.

This is Carey Mulligan's big moment. She was 22, not 16 when the movie was shot but her Jenny – bright but unformed in uniform yet a chic match for Sarsgaard in upswept beehive – is the epitome of a promising young person.

Cinemas nationwide from Friday

This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 25 October 2009