Friday Films: An Education

My biggest problem with the film An Education was that there just wasn’t enough there. It was only an hour and a half long, which is fine if there seems to be a complete story told in those 90 minutes, but I felt like the movie was…I don’t know, inconsequential? I didn’t feel particularly invested in the characters, even though the film was well acted, and when it ended I found myself asking, “that’s it?” And it was a different kind of “that’s it?” than I experienced watching A Serious Man, which at least had some narrative shape.

The film follows Jenny, a young suburban British girl who begins a relationship with an older man who turns out to be a con artist. And then she finds out he’s married, but not before she quits school and gets engaged to him. That’s it. The film ends with a cheesy voice-over about how she moved on with her life and started acting her age. There didn't seem to be anything at stake, really, so I didn't feel at all engaged with the story or characters.

The screenplay was written by Nick Hornby, a writer I really admire, and I found myself wondering if there just wasn’t enough source material. The movie was adapted from an essay that appeared in Granta, and it seems to me there wasn’t enough to fill an entire movie. Maybe it would have made a great short film. Or it’s possible that Nick Hornby would have been better-utilized if the movie was taken in a different direction. What if the protagonist was the older, restless and philandering married man? That’s a Nick Hornby character, isn’t it?

Like I said earlier, the acting was very solid throughout. Carey Mulligan, as Jenny, really embodied that feeling of being young and afraid you’re missing out on everything fun going on elsewhere (even if she became a less sympathetic character as the movie went on), and Peter Sarsgaard was surprising as David, the man Jenny dates; it looked like he put on some weight to play this part, and he looked like a pale, doughy British man. And Alfred Molina was excellent as always, playing Jenny’s father. He had some of the best lines in the movie, even though the fact that his character would stand back and let his daughter go around with a man twice her age without any real protest seemed to strain believability for me.

Oh, and Olivia Williams, also known as Rosemary Cross from Rushmore, appeared in the movie as Jenny’s teacher. Which only served to remind me that I liked Rushmore a lot more than An Education.