An Education (2009) is a story about trees, and the things that bloom on their branches. When we’re introduced to precocious 16-year-old Jenny (Carey Mulligan), her whole life is oriented around getting into Oxford, mostly at her father’s behest. It’s unclear what, exactly, Jack (Alfred Molina), does all day besides tell his daughter to study harder and then complain about the costs associated with her pursuit of academic excellence. “That’s the beauty of life, Jenny. You don’t have to pay for anything. There’s a lovely Oxford tree growing in the garden,” he says sarcastically, as if it’s her fault that the hoops he’s mandated she jump through come with a price. It’s a familiar rebuke, however undeserved, from a guardian who controls his child’s access to limited resources: Don’t take what you have for granted. Remember that I’m the one making all this possible.
A disturbing echo of this conversation occurs later in the movie, when David (Peter Sarsgaard), a 35-year-old wolf in sheep’s clothing and Jenny’s new “boyfriend,” tells her that “these weekends, and the restaurants and the concerts, they don’t grow on trees.” Yet another condescending older man informing her that the things we want in this world aren’t guaranteed, as if that’s news to her. Everything is a nonrenewable resource when you’re a teenage girl – time, money, fun, novelty, your own perceived desirability – so who could blame Jenny for plucking the buds off the tree the second they begin to blossom? If the alternative is her dad’s miserly vigilance and never getting to enjoy things at their freshest and most intoxicating, then let the harvesting commence forthwith. The tragedy is that, to David, Jenny herself is one such forbidden fruit waiting be plucked off the tree, her youth and innocence another form of capital he can exploit and hoard for his own. In exchanging the sheltered bubble of her family’s garden for the serpent’s worldly knowledge and experience, our Eve’s loss of innocence is complete.
Man meets underage girl half his age. Man introduces himself to underage girl’s parents. Underage girl’s parents grant man permission to take her on unsupervised cross-country and international trips. A tale as old as time! If the screenplay for An Education wasn’t based on the memoir of real-life British journalist Lynn Barber, I would’ve taken issue with how freely Jenny’s parents accept David into their lives. How could they not be suspicious of what a grown man could possibly want with their daughter? When he flirts with Jenny’s mom, Marjorie (Cara Seymour), and drinks their alcohol and shakes Jack’s hand with the chumminess of a peer – are there really no alarm bells going off in their heads about Jenny jetting off to Paris with him? It’s bad writing, I might protest, to make the obstacles blocking Jenny and David’s union so easily surmountable. Surely someone as uptight and overbearing as Jenny’s dad would insist on meeting the person supposedly chaperoning her outings with David, an “aunt” who (surprise, surprise) doesn’t actually exist.
But no – they’re content to just take David’s word for it. I’m not sure if this leniency was characteristic of the time period (when Barber was 16, it was 1961) or if her parents were just particularly willing marks; it was probably some combination of both. In any case, there’s no need for David and Jenny to sneak around behind the backs of authority figures – it’s more akin to God watching and cheering as Eve feasts from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Academic institutions don’t seem too concerned with protecting their students from predators of David’s ilk either. When gossip about Jenny’s notorious dalliance spreads to the headmistress, Miss Walters (Emma Thompson), her only intervention is to issue a warning that Jenny will not be allowed to return to school in the event that she loses her virginity. There’s no winning when the adults do nothing to shield you from bad actors and then smugly dole out punishments for the consequences of their own neglect.
You know what else doesn’t grow on trees? Movie star charisma. An Education doesn’t work without Carey Mulligan’s irresistibly winning performance as the protagonist, who’s already conquered the schoolgirl domain with ease and itches with impatience for the rest of her life to start, now. Jenny’s experience is the portal through which the viewer understands the world of the movie – her boredom with writing essays about Jane Eyre is our boredom, her bemusement at a bumbling boy’s crush on her is our bemusement, her disillusionment with the college search is our disillusionment, and her giddiness at the thrill of new adventures with David is our giddiness. When her dimples begin to peek out shyly, as though some irrepressible inner joy is bubbling over to her outer aspect almost despite herself, I’d watch her do anything, including jeopardize her future for the sake of a total scumbag. Mercifully, the movie never veers into gratuitous or prurient territory because Jenny herself doesn’t see these escapades as sleazy or shameful – at least, not while she’s in the middle of them. Yes, she’s a victim of David’s well-oiled operation, but she’s never reduced to a one-dimensional object of scorn or fetishization. She remains herself the whole time: luminous, restless, and too clever by half.
If I have one complaint about An Education, it’s that I wish Helen (Rosamund Pike) got more screen time. All we know about Helen is that she’s dating David’s partner-in-literal-crime, Danny (Dominic Cooper), and seems mostly content with her ornamental role in their relationship. Her character is utterly devoid of texture or dimension – the questions of where she’s from, who her family is, what she wants, and whether she has any other friends or lovers all remain unanswered to the end. Still, even with little more to do than be a vapid bitch, look hot, and act as a foil for Jenny, Pike manages to steal nearly every scene she’s in.
Other Things I Watched & Read Recently:
Beckham
When the subject of a documentary is also an executive producer of it, you know you’re in for a glorified PR exercise. Nevertheless, I had a lot of fun watching this hagiography. Not so much because of the direction (Fisher Stevens AKA Hugo from Succession inserts himself into the series far too much for my liking) but because David and Victoria Beckham have been so beautiful and so famous for so long that it would be nearly impossible to make any retelling of their careers boring. I’m not entirely convinced by the doomsayers proclaiming monoculture’s extinction, but it’s hard to deny that what passes for celebrity today can’t compete the overwhelming scale of Beckham brand at its peak. Can you imagine Love Island contestants garnering such intense public interest that they’d need to announce the sex of their newborn baby to a crowd camped outside the hospital, not even hours after the birth? To me, Posh and Becks are Britain’s actual royal family.
Stray Beckham thoughts:
The British tabloid press ranks among the most sinister institutions to ever exist. We already knew this, but it never hurts to be reminded.
Beckham’s cornrows era is conveniently missing from the docuseries, which is otherwise obsessive in its recounting of his various hairstyles over the years. He put that executive producer credit to good use, clearly.
Do you think David Beckham and Gary Neville ever explored each other’s bodies in the Manchester United youth academy dorms? I bet the futbol fujoshi were going nuts with the Beckville fic on LiveJournal.
Fisher Stevens should be charged with documentarist malpractice for neglecting to ask David about his son Brooklyn’s unsuccessful forays into photography and the culinary arts.
My dad’s review:
It Happened One Night
If romcoms live and die by the chemistry between their leads, then this one was dead upon arrival. All the ingredients are there (a kooky premise, tons of hijinks, and two charming actors), but I remain unconvinced that spoiled socialite Ellie (Claudette Colbert) and cynical reporter Peter (Clark Gable) are meant for each other. It Happened One Night (1934) is more “com” than “rom,” in the end, and I found myself merely entertained rather than transported.
I wanted to see what would happen in Peter’s newsroom more than I wanted to see him and Ellie kiss, honestly. Imagine dedicating the front page of your paper to tracking every minute development in a local society scandal, for days at a time. The modern-day equivalent would be anonymous Deuxmoi submissions, I guess? We used to be a proper country!
The Door
If you read one novel in 2023, make it this one. Part fairytale and part domestic thriller, The Door is an intimate, unflinching excavation of the complicated relationship between two women: Magda, a writer who shares the same name as the author (Magda Szabó, one of Hungary’s most influential writers), and Emerence, her older housekeeper. What they actually are to each other is much stranger and more fraught than simply employer-employee, of course, and Szabó’s unspooling of the tangled thread tying them to each other is masterful. If it seems like I’m being vague about the plot it’s because nothing much actually happens – Magda writes, her husband gets sick, they take in a dog, and Emerence sweeps and cleans and cooks – and that’s not the point of the novel, anyway. The point is surrendering to Szabó’s literary hypnosis, spiraling deeper and deeper into Magda and Emerence’s obsessive, tender, feral connection and trying in vain to shake off an ever-mounting sense of dread. Finishing the novel was like coming out of a trance, questioning what was real and what was imagined, and knowing that you’ll be haunted by all of it either way.