An Education

Directed by Lone Scherfig

Runtime: 95 min.

Jenny (Carey Mulligan), the English schoolgirl whose piggy face reveals a gluttonous soul in the Anglophile drama An Education, is actually a stand-in for contemporary youth.The film’s 1961 setting is a pretense by which pop novelist Nick Hornby’s screenplay (from Lynn Barber’s memoir) panders to his usual hipster market. Jenny may represent the post-WWII middle-class’ longing for better as she studies for exams to get into Oxford, but in attitude and behavior, she’s really a Reagan baby, raised in Clinton-era convenience.

At age 16, Jenny has an affair with a much older man, David (Peter Sarsgaard), a gangster whose Jewish background and taste for rich living is meant to show another form of class aggression. (“This is who we are,” is the explanation he proffers.) The Clinton-Lewinsky aspect of their relationship only seems right in terms of modern, post-Pill morality; it feels terribly bogus for the 1960s.

It’s this misrepresentation of the era’s social tone that exposes An Education’s contrivance. Hornby and director Lone Scherfig seem insensitive to the basic issues of this dishonest odd couple. David robs old ladies’ homes and fences private property, including Jenny herself who is cuckolded under the nose of her status-minded parents.Yet Jenny never asks the basic questions we need to know about David’s background or his ethics. She has none herself and that’s apparently cool with Hornby and Scherfig. This is their Merchant-Ivory version of Juno.

Instead of Juno’s adolescent-hipster whimsy, An Education gets high-toned. Jenny writes a book report titled “Passion and Practicality in Jane Eyre”; she coos over Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne- Jones (David urges her to bid for the painting The Tree of Forgiveness at a ritzy auction); and she brags to her virginal classmates about David taking her to Paris—even bringing back bottles of perfume as souvenirs. The plot’s a cynical/sentimental rip-off of Flaubert’s novel Sentimental Education, yet full of commercial calculation—including Scherfig’s romantic view of the Paris assignation.

Jenny’s teenage naiveté is so coddled it amounts to moral laxity.When the no-nonsense headmistress (Emma Thompson) cautions, “You’re not a woman, you’re a girl,” Jenny responds with a risible climactic speech about life being “hard and boring.” She shows a childish insistence on having fun that Hornby and Scherfig present as wisdom. It’s not the painful awareness of the rough world and compromised adulthood such as Shelagh Delaney observed in her classic English-girl coming-of-age drama A Taste of Honey, rather, this is the “wisdom” of the Britney Spears marketplace.That explains the bizarre response when Jenny’s mother hears about her wedding announcement, “Do you have a choice or is it too late?” Mom’s casual enthusiasm proves Hornby is not only patronizing but also anachronistic.