Movie Review: Love and Uncomfortable Endings in An Education

Switching gears from the horror/noir/gothic kick I’ve been on lately, I would like to devote this post to Lone Scherfig’s new film An Education.  While this movie is not a horror film per se, it does touch upon one of the themes that has come up recently in discussing such previously blogged-about  films as Rosemary’s Baby, The Others, The Exorcist and even Sunset Boulevard.  Namely, this movie shares with these other films the major thematic touchstone of the “trapped woman”.  The idea of a 1960’s British teenager who falls in love with an older man might not readily conjure up the images of, respectively, a woman raped by the devil, a woman trapped inside a haunted mansion, a girl possessed by the devil, or a delusional elderly woman secluded from the outside world due to her own warped convictions, An Education puts its heroine, Jenny, in a position that is just as helpless and harrowing as that of Rosemary’s, Graces’, Regan/Chris’ and Norma’s.  The one thing that keeps An Education, fine film that it is, from reaching the artistic heights of these others is the ending.  But, we’ll get into that later.

First off, you should absolutely eat up all of the superlative praise out there on the interwebs for Education’s lead actress Carey Mulligan.  This girl has chops.  She carries almost all of the emotional weight of a very emotional narrative, and does so without once ringing a false note.  She will win many awards for her work in this film and she will deserve all of them.  Playing alongside Ms. Mulligan is Peter Sarsgaard, who does what Peter Sarsgaard does best: play a creep.  I do not mean this in a pejorative sense; this film is reliant upon an actor in the David role who is able to come across as both creepy and charismatic simultaneously.   David seduces half-his-age Jenny and quickly reveals himself as a morally fuzzy suitor; yet despite Dave’s rough spots, the audience must never doubt that Jenny can be wildly attracted to this man.  Sarsgaard skates this line with aplomb.  Alfred Molina is his usual excellent self in the role of Jenny’s strict but vulnerable father.  Other notable cast members are Emma Thompson as the headmaster of a private school and Olivia Williams as a private school English teacher, a role that has interesting parallels to her role in one of my favorite films of the 1990s: Rushmore.  In Rushmore, Williams plays a private school teacher seduced by a much younger boy, whereas in Education she plays a teacher advising a young girl who is seduced by a much older man.  Her facial expression is very similar in both films — she plays both roles so well that I think she should slap a trademark on the “I’m upset at this romance involving incongruently-aged people” face.

An Education is Nick Hornby’s first foray into scriptwriting since 1997’s Fever Pitch (not the 2005 Jimmy Fallon Red Sox film, although this was also based on Hornby’s novel of the same name).  Education‘s script is very well-written, with a slowly building sense of dread punctuated with moments of deep despair along with a sprinkling of humor.  Much of the light-hearted moments are piled on in the beginning of the film, and I noticed that many people in the audience at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas in Vancouver, BC really wanted to keep the good times rolling long after the initial Jenny/Dave meet-cute stops being cute and one realizes that Jenny has painted herself in a corner that she may never get out of.  Gleeful guffaws became nervous laughter which tapered off into pointed silence as the situation worsened and a story that could have veered into RomCom treacle instead carried through with the sometimes uncomfortable implications of its setup and its characters.  Imagine that.

However, as I brought up earlier, the ending left me feeling like a double-crossed Bubble-Lub.  The film earned my trust and then squandered it with the employment of a voiceover and a syrupy pan out in the final scene of the film.  I’m not entirely anti-voiceover, but there had not been a voiceover up to this point in the movie, so why introduce one  in the very last scene?  Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Others and Sunset Boulevard all have very effective endings.  The endings of all of these films ensure that the feeling that had been cultivated throughout will linger in the filmgoer’s mind long after the theatre has been deserted.  Sunset Boulevard, which employs heavy voiceover from the beginning (granted, the acerbic voiceover of a dead man), is witty enough to eschew voiceover in its final scene in favor of a Norma Desmond monologue that is, in the final shot of the film, drowned in black like the overpowering delusions within Norma Desmond’s mind.  Boulevard features one of the best endings in the history of popular film.  An Education, however, fizzles.   I realize that it isn’t fair to require that every film hold up to the standard of Sunset Boulevard, but still you get my point.  The narrative ending of Education didn’t bother me necessarily, but the spell invoked by the film prior to the final scene was broken by an uninteresting and too-neat visual and auditory wrap-up that comes across as lazy.  It just doesn’t do justice to a very well-paced, well-acted and otherwise well-made movie.  Regardless, I still recommend it — I simply suggest that you ignore the ending in the way that a teenager might look past the glaring faults of an otherwise sophisticated lover.

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~ by kajltomas on November 17, 2009.