Salina Art Center

London in the 1960’s wasn’t always “Swinging London.” In the suburb of Twickenham, 1961-a couple years before the Beatles had their first British hit-there wasn’t much swinging at all. In fact, there was a definite shortage of glamour and sophistication for the youth to latch onto. There wasn’t even a real “youth scene,” and most of the Angry Young Men had finished their ranting by 1960. There were, however, a lot of frustrated middle-class teenagers with dreams of glamour and sophistication but not much hope of attaining those dreams. This period of adolescent angst is expertly drawn by Danish director Lone Scherfig, with significant assistance from witty and perceptive scenarist Nick Hornby (About a Boy, High Fidelity), who adapted the memoir of British journalist Lynn Barber. Lynn’s stand-in here is Jenny, a teenage girl who wants to escape her drab existence, enter the world of adulthood, and have “experiences.”  At first, her scholarship to Oxford seems like the ticket; but when Jenny meets David Goldman (Peter Sarsgaard), her aspirations change. David is charming, amusing, seemingly cultured-a slick operator-and twice Jenny’s age. He’s a slippery character, not quite trustworthy, and weak at the core, but it’s hard to determine precisely how much his pursuit of Jenny is genuine love and how much is the motions of an aging, insecure loverboy asserting his prowess. Jenny’s gullible father (Alfred Molina) seems snowed by David’s line of patter, and Jenny herself finds it hard to resist “an education” that includes visits to art auctions, concerts-and romantic evenings in Paris-and acquaintance with people like David’s somewhat shady “business partner” Danny (Dominic Cooper) and Danny’s ditzy girlfriend Helen (Rosamund Pike in a hilarious performance). In smaller roles, there are excellent performances as well from Olivia Williams as a caring schoolteacher and Emma Thompson as the school’s uptight headmistress. The most exciting “discovery,” though, is Carey Mulligan as Jenny. In a truly star-making role where she has been compared to Audrey Hepburn for her delicate beauty, unaffected demeanor, intelligence, wit, and charm, Mulligan is dazzling-“luminous,” as critic Roger Ebert proclaimed. An Education is a film that excels in so many areas: strong, sympathetic direction; genuine sympathy for teenage ennui; a gently satiric screenplay with sharp, realistic dialogue; and the sense of recognition viewers get when they see Jenny’s awkward, naïve, often painful attempts to join the adult world. The female bildungsroman is a challenge, particularly treacherous in film: too often these “coming of age” stories become cloyingly sentimental, self-pitying, embarrassing, or obscured by an overly nostalgic lens. An Education avoids all of these traps, and Carey Mulligan helps guide it through some tricky waters (as some critics have noted, the recent renewal of interest in the Roman Polanski affair has made the on-screen seduction of teenage girls rather controversial, though Scherfig and Hornby handle the material tastefully and realistically). Mulligan is perfect as the precocious ingénue who fancies herself a Parisian sophisticate and existential philosopher-don’t most teenagers go through this phase?-yet retains the audience’s sympathy throughout. Mulligan also resists the temptation to make Jenny a victim. Perhaps she took to heart what Lynn Barber wrote in her memoir, when she explains that she was ultimately glad to have the experience, but that her affair with an older man “entirely cured my craving for sophistication” by the time she went to college. The title is ironic, of course, reflecting Barber’s view that the experience was an education in life-an education that woke her up to reality. The film won the Audience Prize for world cinema at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, showing how deeply audiences connected with what is essentially a timeless story of a young girl’s maturation from child to adult. Carey Mulligan makes that transformation both subtle and realistic, marked not by melodramatic plot twists or tragedy, but by her ability to fully inhabit the character and grow wiser before our eyes. It’s one of the best performances (male or female) of the decade, and a big reason why An Education is so moving and unforgettable.