This Best Picture Oscar Nominee Has Great Charm
Nominated for three Academy Awards — Best Picture, Best Actress (Carey Mulligan) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Nick Hornby) — An Education (2009) is a charming British independent film. Carey Mulligan is brilliant in the role of the teenage protagonist, and she is supported by a fine cast that includes Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina, Dominic Cooper, Rosamund Pike and Emma Thompson. The story came from Lynn Barber's memoir in a literary journal about when she was 16 and had an affair with a man more than twice her age. Then the filmmakers turned Barber's slight tale into a reflection of society's transformation from the drab 1950s to the swinging 1960s.
When the movie opens in 1961, its main character Jenny (Mulligan) is seen to be a good-looking, socially adept 16-year-old who's academically at the top of her class. But her stuffy school and boring life in the London suburbs with her doting, middle-class parents leave her yearning for glamour and excitement. Impatient to grow up, Jenny seizes her opportunity when she meets David (Sarsgaard), a suave, fun-loving man who's 35-ish. She gets into a romance with him and learns a lot about herself and the world.
Jenny is often manipulative and sometimes deceitful, but Carey Mulligan imbues her character with a winning earnestness. As we watch Jenny and David, they make such an appealing couple we find ourselves rooting for them, despite our gnawing feeling that their relationship isn't quite right. However, Jenny has to learn for herself that while risks can be worth taking, there may be prices to be paid.
Supplementary Materials
The extras on the DVD containing An Education are so-so. Perhaps the best is the nine-minute "The Making of An Education," which allows you to see and hear from cast members, screenwriter Nick Hornby, director Lone Scherfig (a woman originally from Denmark), and memoirist Lynn Barber. The eight-minute "Walking the Red Carpet" consists of interviews before the film's premiere at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. There are also 11 deleted scenes with a total runtime of 16 minutes, and a couple of these are mildly interesting, but it would have been a mistake for this small gem of a movie to run any longer than it does. Finally, the DVD provides a feature-length audio commentary by director Lone Scherfig and lead actors Carey Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard, and while they occasionally say something worth hearing, they mostly just engage in chitchat.
DVD Release Date: March 30, 2010
Feature Film Runtime: 1 hour 40 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for Mature Thematic Material Involving Sexual Content, and for Smoking
