Screengrab editor emeritus Bilge Ebiri reports from the frontlines of Park City.
Gimmick-free and solid in all the right ways, Lone Scherfig’s An Education, based on a memoir by Lynn Barber (with a screenplay by Nick Hornby) is the kind of absorbing, literate drama that often gets lost at a place like Sundance. Luckily, it’s also got a breakout performance at its heart – Carey Mulligan, who also appears in The Greatest at the festival – and has attracted serious attention from both audiences and industry.
Set in the early 60s, the film is the story of 16-year old Jenny (Mulligan), a precocious and beautiful schoolgirl from a lower middle-class milieu who studies hard, plays the cello, and rifles through a dog eared copy of L’Etranger while dreaming of going to France, as Juliette Greco sings in the background. Jenny isn’t exactly a goody two-shoes, however. Most likely Oxford-bound, she has the smarts and the passion to know that she’s cut out for better things. One day, when David (Peter Sarsgaard), a handsome, older man with a taste for all the fine things she only dreams about, drives by and shows an interest in her, Jenny falls fast. David is a charmer, to be sure. He’s got money, he’s got friends who hang out at auctions and buy Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and he also has plenty of pointed lies to deploy: He convinces Jenny’s conservative parents to let him take her for a weekend jaunt to Oxford by promising he’ll introduce her to C.S. Lewis (or, as he calls him, “Clive”).
David’s facility with untruths doesn’t trouble Jenny at first, and although we can certainly sense that this romance isn’t exactly headed in the right direction, the film never turns David into a villain. His love for Jenny feels true, and we get the sense that we’re watching a man who can’t help himself in her presence, even as the lies and inconsistencies rack up. Sarsgaard brings a perfect blend of mystery and affability to the character; he seems harmless, even as we sense that there are undiscovered corners of his soul. In other words, we like the snake – a rare occurrence in this sort of film.
Sarsgaard may be great (and mention should also be made of the always-reliable Alfred Molina as Jenny’s well-meaning but ambitious father), but this is Mulligan’s film all the way. It’s a deceptively tricky part: We have to watch this whip-smart girl accumulate and compound her mistakes without losing sympathy or involvement with her story. That she maintains her character’s grace and poise even as the façade begins to collapse around her is a testament both to Mulligan’s riveting performance and to the way that Scherfig and Hornby place us firmly within her world.