'An Education'

Nick Hornsby often seems to tell stories through the eyes of man-boys who can't seem to overcome some abstract hurdle in order to leave the 'boy' behind. Hornsby's latest offering, 'An Education', finds him taking on a tale of another man who refuses to settle into adulthood. This time though, we're told the tale through the eyes of someone who becomes a victim of his behavior. Working from former Penthouse writer Lynn Barber's memoir, 'An Education' finds sixteen year old Jenny gracefully seduced by dapper David, a man over a decade her senior. David's elegant charm and worldly ways are a perfect fit for Jenny's daydreams for all things Paris and sophistication. After a lifetime of academic pressures and speeches from her overzealous father on the importance of college, Jenny thinks she finds a smooth escape into a better life. Precocious and skeptical, she quickly takes on a condescending perspective of just about everything around her - even questioning the point of the whole educational system to her school's headmaster. This becomes all the more dangerous as her parents warm to David to the point where they soon favor him over everything they've been pressuring her towards her whole life. This can all be filed under: imminent disaster. The film is spent waiting to find out when and how it will all happen. And director Lone Scherfig finds a way to make it all an endless pleasure.

This is possible in no small part to the meticulously put-together mise-en-scene, which triumphantly recreates the pre-swinging, mod London. The suits and dresses are always appealing, the parties never stop being fabulous, and the cars make you long for the days when people still knew how to design them. The beautiful Carey Mulligan (looking for all the world like Britain's answer to Katie Holmes) does wonders as Jenny. She's precocious schoolgirl, agitated daughter, and flirty socialite all the same. It's impossible to take your eyes off her, even when she's playing opposite Peter Saarsgard; who's a long way here from 'Boys Don't Cry'. I don't always buy his english accent, but I do believe how her parents could be as conned and seduced by his David as Jenny is. Alfred Molina adds another remarkable performance to his resume as Jenny's lovingly flappable father who slowly lets Jenny and David's love affair get out of hand. It's a a subtly great performance, and one that ultimately exudes more love than any other relationship in the film. In his brief time on screen, young Matthew Beard almost steals the show as Jenny's smitten schoolmate, who handles with her deflection with such bumbling charm that you want to cry thinking about what's going on in his young heart.

Beard's departure from the film, like the film's ending itself, is disappointingly sudden and unresolved. As the men in Jenny's life vanish from the screen, they do so with no sense of resolution and next to no reflection. The film ends in a similar manner, with the curtain closing before it feels we've reached the end of this journey we were all on. But these ultimately feel like a small price to pay for an otherwise great movie.