An Education

Life lessons come with a price in ‘An Education’

October 16, 2009|Ty Burr, Globe Staff

The animated opening credits of “An Education’’ promise untold delights, to us and to the movie’s heroine. Martinis and phonographs, jazz, and Paris - these are the tokens of adult bliss if you’re a smart, bored 16-year-old girl in 1961 London. They come with a price, of course, since what coming-of-age movie lets its main character off scot-free? That Lone Scherfig’s wise and engaging drama runs so smoothly on its well-established rails is its pleasure and its limitation.

There’s the added bonus of finding a brand new talent under our collective nose. The British actress Carey Mulligan plays all sides of schoolgirl Jenny in the same quicksilver breath: the clever A-student, the arch young cynic, the Left Bank existentialist wannabe, the naive girl, the lover, the fool. Comparisons have been made to Audrey Hepburn and when Jenny piles her hair up in one scene for a walk down a Paris sidewalk, you may be dazzled into agreement. Mulligan has tarter charms, though - she’s not chic but watchful and sly. A star may or may not be born in “An Education,’’ but an actress most surely is.

When the movie begins, all is going according to plan: Jenny is acing her studies and extracurriculars and seems unstoppably Oxford bound. After that the vision of her parents and schoolteachers turns cloudy. Presumably Jenny will marry a social class or two above her, which is what matters. For herself, she sneaks smokes, listens to Juliette Greco albums, and yearns desperately to be French. The film beautifully captures that moment just before the Beatles arrived and changed everything, when post-war England was a dead end and to be young was to dream of escape.

Then Jenny meets David (Peter Sarsgaard), who is not part of the plan: 30-ish, Jewish, charmish. He has a sports car and smart suits, and what he does for a living is interestingly vague. He knows colored people; he can talk jazz and classical; he has been to Paris. The screenwriter is author Nick Hornby, adapting a memoir by Lynn Barber, and he and director Scherfig and actress Mulligan all understand what Jane Austen understood: Watching an intelligent woman swoon can be great, moving entertainment.