Half-Assed Movie Reviews

December 8, 2009:  An Education

I hadn’t been overly keen to see An Education, not knowing much about it, but it has been burning through the festival circuit and has huge Oscar potential, and right now I’m in the phase of my annual Oscar-viewing preparation where I try to knock off the obvious selections to save myself some time in January and February.  Well, it turns out that I needn’t have worried – this was an excellent film.

Newcomer Carey Mulligan plays Jenny, a London teenager in 1961, a very bright student with the very real prospect of an Oxford education, who falls in with a group of socialite friends including a charming and much older potential suitor.  Her parents are wary at first, then enthusiastic, then increasingly displeased as Jenny’s grades begin to drop and she’s clearly becoming more involved with this man than a 16-year-old should be.  Jenny struggles with the contrast between the museums, recitals, concerts and Paris weekends she experiences with her new friends, and the endlessly dull study of Latin just so that she can go to Oxford and endlessly study dull literature, just so that she may one day have a dull job.  It’s an understandable dilemma, and a key point is that the adults in Jenny’s life have a hard time explaining the value and meaning of the life they expect her to lead.

It’s appropriate, and surely not accidental, that this film’s title refers to education, because the struggle involves coming to terms with how studying books can be considered education, but experiencing the events from books in real life is somehow frowned upon as not being educational.  One wonders about the point of life in general (for the second time in this evening for me – Up in the Air covered similar territory).

This is a topic I have considered and discussed a fair amount, in the form of the “three Es” – Education, Experience, and Entertainment.  The three are often considered to fall in that order in their importance.  Education is untouchable, permanent, worthwhile and universally valuable.  Experience is necessary in order to bring perspective to education, and provides memories and brings learnings into context.  Entertainment is fleeting, not entirely without value, but ultimately it can be empty.  So, what do Jenny’s parents and teachers want for her, and what does she want for herself, and what is she actually experiencing with her new friends?  This whirlwind of activity involves a certain amount of education from a musical and fine arts perspective, but primarily at first it provides experience.  Of course, going to museums and seeing live performances of music (Jenny plays the cello and has longed to see professionals perform live), and even going to late-night clubs in London’s West End are definitely experiences, and they have undeniable value, and that’s why her parents and teachers can’t protest too much at the start.  But as she falls further into this hedonistic lifestyle of a questionable work ethic and endless leisure, the initial and essential experience degrades into mere entertainment and the substance disappears.  Jenny, caught up in it all exactly as a teenager would be, doesn’t see the subtlety of this transition and simply sees herself as becoming more sophisticated.

I might have liked to see her come to the realization of this emptiness on her own, rather than having an outside influence cause everything to collapse instead, but it’s probably more realistic that she didn’t and so I don’t fault the film for that and it might even seem more natural upon a second viewing.

As an interesting aside, the very fact that I’m writing this review comes from my own conscious questioning of why I watch movies and what I want to get out of them.  It was getting to a point where it seemed like movies were just a default pursuit and definitely an aimless one, something which could be an experience or even educational but which had undeniably become mere entertainment.  By writing about each movie I see, I feel that I can elevate each block of time spent on a film to the level of an experience by deliberately spending time thinking about where it fits into my perspective on the world, and there are even educational aspects to it as I research more about the filmmakers and the events depicted, in order to write accurately and expand my knowledge of a subject.  The Half-Assed Movie Reviews reader, therefore, no offense intended, is completely unnecessary, although readership is of course appreciated.

With a stellar supporting cast including Peter Sarsgaard as the charming beau, Emma Thompson as the headmistress, Olivia Williams as Jenny’s English teacher, Rosamund Pike as one of the socialites, Alfred Molina as the father, and Cara Seymour as the mother, An Education has no shortage of talent on show.  We’ll definitely see this one clean up during the awards season.  It’s enjoyable, engrossing, and makes you think.

Fascinating study of what life’s about.