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PrintIf you're an adult, your Spidey sense tingles when David (Peter Sarsgaard) rolls up to rescue a school girl from the rain in "An Education."
David tells the 16-year-old if she has any sense, she won't take a lift from a strange man but he's worried about the cello she's lugging. And she can walk alongside the car if she prefers.
It's the more trusting time of 1961 and Jenny (Carey Mulligan) climbs into his sporty little ride, setting the stage for all sorts of lessons not covered at the English girls' school where she excels.
Her father (Alfred Molina) carefully has planned her education and extracurricular activities so she can go to Oxford but he doesn't count on David entering their suburban London lives.
- Starring: Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard
- Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic material involving sexual content, and for smoking
- Web site: 'An Education'
David represents everything Jenny has fantasized about: love, sophistication, passage to a world of concerts, art auctions and jazz clubs, plus the prospect of using her schoolgirl French in Paris. Compared to David, her teenage suitor is awkward, bashful and, well, boyish.
The older man in her life makes her rethink Oxford and the sort of job she might get. This is 1961, after all, when women are steered (or restricted) to fields such as teaching or civil service.
Jenny's friends swoon at her beau, a teacher who gets a whiff of the romance expresses disapproval but in the end, Jenny has to face the hard truths and choices in her life.
Lone Scherfig directs "An Education," written by Nick Hornby based on a memoir by Lynn Barber.
It first appeared in a literary magazine where Barber confessed she was astonished by how few questions she asked her first boyfriend. "One of the rules of existentialism as practiced by me and my disciples at Lady Eleanor Holles School was that you never asked questions," unless you wanted to appear naive and bourgeois.
Jenny isn't the first girl to fall for an older man although she is the rare one who doesn't hide him from her parents. However, Jenny is the first to be played by Carey Mulligan, 22 years old at the time of filming and quite convincing as a teen.
She projects Jenny's intelligence and precociousness, her banked excitement at the adult world she is ushered into and her superiority as she thinks she has it all figured out -- even if Emma Thompson's withering headmistress says otherwise.
Mulligan, who looks a bit like a younger Katie Holmes in some scenes, and Sarsgaard appeared together in "The Seagull" on Broadway. She was Kitty Bennet in 2005's "Pride & Prejudice" and, in a sign of times to come, a girl more interested in the father than the son on holiday in "When Did You Last See Your Father?"
Sarsgaard, who pulls off a British accent, is handsome and appealing without being overly aggressive and you can see why Jenny takes a tumble. The story is hers and no one else's but he makes it work.
Rounding out the cast are Dominic Cooper as a business associate of David's and Rosamund Pike as his beautiful but dim-witted girlfriend, Cara Seymour as Jenny's mother, Olivia Williams as a teacher and Matthew Beard as Jenny's young suitor.
This is not the swinging England of "Pirate Radio," and the Beatles haven't even burst onto the scene. England at this juncture is harder for us to appreciate but breakout star Mulligan's coming of age works with or without an English accent.
Sometimes, even the smart girls have something to learn.
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