AN EDUCATION (2009)

Posted by Stephen Jannise

Director Lone Scherfig’s new film An Education will whisk you away, along with bright new star Carey Mulligan, on a romantic adventure to London, Paris, and beyond. The film is delightful, and the startling lead performance by Mulligan is matched by the sly charm of Peter Sarsgaard and the well-meaning bluster of Alfred Molina. However, if you’re like me, you’ll recognize while watching a few key scenes just how great this movie might have been if it weren’t so distracted by all the fun it’s having.

Indeed, the film faces the same dilemma that its protagonist does. Mulligan portrays a young student in 1960s Britain who begins to realize that her father has been encouraging her to study hard and go to Oxford not for her own personal progress as an intellectual but in the hopes that she might meet a smart and ambitious young man at Oxford and be married to him. Faced with this revelation, Mulligan rebels, telling a teacher who had put a great deal of effort into Mulligan’s education that she would rather enjoy life and have fun than work hard at school only to end up a housewife. In swoops Peter Sarsgaard, a man who, like so many others in this kind of film, is too good to be true. The two fall in love, and Mulligan drops out of school in order to spend all her time dining at fine restaurants, attending art auctions, and touring the countryside.

In the midst of all this merriment, the really intriguing dilemma of an intelligent young girl facing a lifetime spent in domesticity or civil service gets lost, with a couple of particularly powerful scenes reminding us of the issues that are huddling underneath the frivolity. In particular, when Mulligan has it out with her headmistress, played by Emma Thompson, over the decision to leave school, Thompson’s inability (or unwillingness?) to provide Mulligan with a straight answer as to why she should continue her education leaves us wondering whether the headmistress simply doesn’t have a good argument for women’s continuing education or whether she merely wants the young student to figure it out for herself.

In a post-coital revelation, she realizes how fleeting, and unfulfilling, pleasure can be.

The scenes between Mulligan and both Thompson and the teacher, played by Olivia Williams, are quite incisive, with the older women reminding the young student of her inexperience and begging her to see her education through to the end. Finally, a heartbreaking scene between the girl and her father, in which he confesses that he could have been a better father while simultaneously imploring her to keep up her end of the bargain as a daughter, suggests that it must have been equally difficult to be the parent of a daughter at that time, trying to continue encouraging her to educate herself when you fear that all the hard work will likely be for naught. These are intriguing topics that the film touches upon but doesn’t ultimately confront completely. Unlike Mulligan’s character, who indulges herself with a few flights of fancy and no regrets, I left the theater wondering what might have been if the film had stayed grounded.