An Education (2009)

Weighty is the word I keep coming back to when I think of this movie, it has substance and heft, and reminds me of all those really solid dramas that were part of the 2008 awards season (the story here even has a number of thematic parallels to my favorite film of last year The Reader). An Education is about just that, in 1961 a young London girl named Jenny (Carey Mulligan in what so far is my favorite female performance of ‘09) who embarks on a love affair with an older, more then just a little suspicious seeming man (Peter Sarsgaard, in an excellently realized, subtle performance). The film does an excellent job of conveying how Jenny’s experience with this older man provides ‘an education’ into a new supposedly high class world she has aspired to, but never before experienced. This ‘education’ runs the spectrum from the wide-eyed innocence of the young girl visiting her first fancy restaurant (with live jazz singer) to heartbreaking disillusionment, and even betrayal. I like how the movie starts with such a jaunty, catchy, innocent jazz number, complete with images of teenage school girls and drawings of paper airplanes, and takes that innocence on a journey that (as I said) just gets weightier and weightier as it progresses. I think it’s the best character journey of its year, and a refreshingly serious entry from a movie year that frankly wasn’t. Recommended.