An Education
Director: Lone Scherfig
Year: 2009
Stars: Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Dominic Cooper, Alfred Molina, Cara Seymour
I wanted to watch this movie because I knew it was up for some kind of award - a BAFTA, or Oscar, or something, for (I think) the lead actress... (I just checked - it's up for Best Film, Best Actress and Best Screenplay at both the Oscars and the BAFTAs, plus a host of other awards at the BAFTAs and a range of other award ceremonies). The trailers also made it look quite intelligent, and I fancied something a bit different. The fact that's it a British movie helped as well, as I'm keen to support British cinema where I can - as long as it's good!
An Education follows the life of Jenny (Mulligan), a school girl in the 1960s who meets David (Sarsgaard), an older man who shows her how life could be if she didn't have to spend her whole life studying in order to go to university.
The film is very insightful, with some great ideas and opinions threading through it. At first you think Jenny will be vulnerable because she is young, but she quickly proves this not to be the case at all, making you identify with her much more. The one downside is that the ending is somewhat predictable. You can see it coming a long way off, and you really hope it will get subverted somehow. Unfortunately, it doesn't.
The ending is meant to make Jenny's opinions from earlier in the film invalid, but the film simply doesn't give enough reasons as to why this is the case - if things had turned out differently, could the film have reached the same conclusion? If it could have, it needed to explain why, and it didn't. However, the fact that I ended up questioning this at all tells me the film has a lot going for it, and I would highly recommend it.
Rating: 4 out of 5
About Me
- Anna Lawson
- I live in Bristol with my husband Dan (who I married in July 2007), my son Joe (born 2012) and daughter Jess (born 2015). I work at UWE (the University of the West of England) in Bristol as a Research and Open Access Librarian. I'm orginally from Exeter, so moving back to Bristol is a bit like coming home - especially as I studied for my undergraduate degree here (also at UWE). I love travelling and movies, although I get to do a lot less of both since the birth of our children. Although we have still managed to fit in holidays to the Isles of Scilly, Chamonix and a summer in California since Joe was born.
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