Girl, Uncorrupted

[November 4th, 2009]

Not since Rolf the friendly Nazi informed Liesl in The Sound of Music that because she was 16 going on 17, he’d take care of her, has a movie contemplated the compromise of a minor with as much good cheer as does An Education. The movie, which has been lifted by Danish director Lone Scherfig and pop writer Nick Hornby from the memoirs of British journalist Lynn Barber, has the rueful humor of many reminiscences of sleepy England at the cusp of erotic awakening. It is set in London two years before the moment when, as Philip Larkin wrote, “Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three”—a revolution, the poet adds, that was “just too late for me.” But 1961 was just too early for Barber, who was herself 16 going on 17, and seduced by a suitor twice her age. The movie’s dramatization of these events is funny and heartening—but praising it raises the question of how funny and heartening a movie about predation ought to be.

Most reviewers (the majority of them older men, it might be noted) have instead offered hosannas to the precocious, Audrey Hepburn-evoking poise of An Education’s lead actress, Carey Mulligan—a chorus made only slightly less creepy by the fact that Mulligan is 24 going on 17. They’re not wrong: Mulligan faultlessly plays the heroine, here called Jenny, as a girl whose worst affectations—snobbery toward her schoolmates, ridicule of her parents, and a tendency to drop French bons mots into everyday conversation—are endearing because they are being tried on for the first time, and tentatively. This is also her attitude, at first, toward David (Peter Sarsgaard), the man who cruises his Bristol automobile to her Twickenham bus stop and offers to give her rain-soaked cello a lift home. Eventually she agrees to get in the car as well, and then join him for dinner, and then concerts, and then a weekend in Oxford beds—he feeds her parents a story that they’re paying a visit to C. S. Lewis. After all, David is so exotic and cosmopolitan—he’s Jewish, and instead of speaking French, he travels to Paris—and C. S. Lewis is the sort of thing she liked back when she was still a little girl.

If these concessions seem to occur terribly quickly, it is in part because Scherfig puts on a clinic in filmmaking economy—she brings the movie home in a mere 95 minutes, without a single wasted shot—and also because David is so silkily ingratiating. This is the role Sarsgaard was born 38 years ago to play. (Oddly, it is also the second time this year he has appeared in an onscreen assignation with a child: He was molested by the titular preadolescent in Orphan. ) He renders this roué as a confidence man in the fullest sense: He makes everyone he talks to feel more confident, as if his interest in them were all the world’s validation. Even Jenny’s suspicion that there’s something not quite centered about him—his business practices are shady, and he has dubious notions about the potential bedroom uses of bananas—only ties her to him more closely, because she’s complicit in his sins. The charm offensive he deploys on her blustering father (Alfred Molina) is a reminder not to trust boyfriends who are too good with parents. Of course, this ranks a distant second behind the rule not to trust boyfriends who date 16-year-olds.

But Sarsgaard’s David becomes increasingly pathetic—by the movie’s end, he seems in some ways more vulnerable than Jenny. However he has taken advantage of her, she belongs to a new era of freedom, and he is stuck scuttling around in the shadows of a world where he only gets what he wants by taking advantage. As adapted by Scherfig and Hornby, An Education is a hopeful prelude to a feminist dawn—that perspective, combined with the performances, is the movie’s great strength, and also its snag. Its ultimate optimism is a rejection of the retroactive power of a predator—to hell with you, you ruined nothing—but it also minimizes his very real violation. An Education is a comedy (its happy ending feels a bit shoved in from stage left), but Barber’s memoirs close with the remark, “I was damaged by my education.” That damage is something the movie would rather end than consider.