A negative review from David Edelstein in NEW YORK MAGAZINE...
If there’s one thing that can pack an art-house cinema, it’s the prospect of watching a pretty English teenager deflowered by a predatory older man, the whole dramatic striptease framed as an “educational experience.” Encourage the press to proclaim the leading actress the new Audrey Hepburn and the come-on is, as the Brits like to say, “Brilliant!” An Education introduces Carey Mulligan as Jenny, a middle-class 16-year-old who dreams of “reading English” at Oxford. It’s 1961, and Jenny is encouraged to the point of fanaticism by her father (Alfred Molina), who regards his only child as the family’s sole hope of climbing a rung on the social ladder. Smoking Gauloises and dropping the odd French phrase, the comely teen is primed to climb. Enter thirtyish Jewish fancy-pants David (Peter Sarsgaard), who gives her a lift in a downpour and is soon gushing, “There’s so much I want you to see!” (Fill in your own rejoinder.) Warned by her prim English teacher (Olivia Williams) of the perils of an alliance with an older man, Jenny increasingly leans toward worldly experience over musty books. It’s touching when she draws the exact wrong lessons from her reading: Yes, the existentialists believe character is defined through action, but trading school for travel and leisure is not what Camus had in mind.
As scripted by Nick Hornby from a memoir by Lynn Barber, the melodrama is not as crude as it first appears. Although David is a transparent liar, there are hints that on some level he actually believes his own effusions, that he wants more than to get into a virgin’s knickers. Jenny’s prospects in that time and place are constricted, and David might offer a kind of emancipation. Meanwhile, the advocates for school—among them Emma Thompson’s snobbish headmistress—inspire little but cynicism.
For all its original touches, though, An Education follows a conventional trajectory. We watch Jenny ignore obvious clues and make dumb mistakes and wait for her eyes to be opened. Lone Scherfig’s direction is glum. We’re so clued in to what’s really going on that we never share Jenny’s authentic excitement at being introduced to art, music, and exotic locales. The story’s most obvious lesson is: Beware of Jews bearing flowers, especially when they look like John Malkovich in Dangerous Liaisons. (Sarsgaard did a wicked Malkovich parody as the actor’s son in The Man in the Iron Mask, but it’s hard to shake off their similar calculating affect.)
How is our alleged Audrey Hepburn? Not very Hepburnesque (the essence of which is buoyancy, enchantment), but charmingly open all the same. At moments, she’s little-girlish: When she smiles, her whole face smiles with her. Other times, she strikes believably grown-up poses—enough to convince you Jenny is not just a poseur, that she’s ready to move on. She gives An Education it’s only real suspense: Will someone like Jenny—who’s right on the border between a naïf and a sophisticate, between girlhood and womanhood—have the self-possession to recover from being “ruined”?
Posts: 27288 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Originally posted by pacinofan: A review from David Edelstein in NEW YORK MAGAZINE...
If there’s one thing that can pack an art-house cinema, it’s the prospect of watching a pretty English teenager deflowered by a predatory older man, the whole dramatic striptease framed as an “educational experience.” Encourage the press to proclaim the leading actress the new Audrey Hepburn and the come-on is, as the Brits like to say, “Brilliant!” An Education introduces Carey Mulligan as Jenny, a middle-class 16-year-old who dreams of “reading English” at Oxford. It’s 1961, and Jenny is encouraged to the point of fanaticism by her father (Alfred Molina), who regards his only child as the family’s sole hope of climbing a rung on the social ladder. Smoking Gauloises and dropping the odd French phrase, the comely teen is primed to climb. Enter thirtyish Jewish fancy-pants David (Peter Sarsgaard), who gives her a lift in a downpour and is soon gushing, “There’s so much I want you to see!” (Fill in your own rejoinder.) Warned by her prim English teacher (Olivia Williams) of the perils of an alliance with an older man, Jenny increasingly leans toward worldly experience over musty books. It’s touching when she draws the exact wrong lessons from her reading: Yes, the existentialists believe character is defined through action, but trading school for travel and leisure is not what Camus had in mind.
As scripted by Nick Hornby from a memoir by Lynn Barber, the melodrama is not as crude as it first appears. Although David is a transparent liar, there are hints that on some level he actually believes his own effusions, that he wants more than to get into a virgin’s knickers. Jenny’s prospects in that time and place are constricted, and David might offer a kind of emancipation. Meanwhile, the advocates for school—among them Emma Thompson’s snobbish headmistress—inspire little but cynicism.
For all its original touches, though, An Education follows a conventional trajectory. We watch Jenny ignore obvious clues and make dumb mistakes and wait for her eyes to be opened. Lone Scherfig’s direction is glum. We’re so clued in to what’s really going on that we never share Jenny’s authentic excitement at being introduced to art, music, and exotic locales. The story’s most obvious lesson is: Beware of Jews bearing flowers, especially when they look like John Malkovich in Dangerous Liaisons. (Sarsgaard did a wicked Malkovich parody as the actor’s son in The Man in the Iron Mask, but it’s hard to shake off their similar calculating affect.)
How is our alleged Audrey Hepburn? Not very Hepburnesque (the essence of which is buoyancy, enchantment), but charmingly open all the same. At moments, she’s little-girlish: When she smiles, her whole face smiles with her. Other times, she strikes believably grown-up poses—enough to convince you Jenny is not just a poseur, that she’s ready to move on. She gives An Education it’s only real suspense: Will someone like Jenny—who’s right on the border between a naïf and a sophisticate, between girlhood and womanhood—have the self-possession to recover from being “ruined”?
Hmm.... I'm going to take a gander and say that he didn't like it.
---- OSCAR FYC: Best Picture - "Up" Best Actor - Michael Stuhlbarg, "A Serious Man" Best Actress - Saoirse Ronan, "Lovely Bones" Best Supporting Actor - Christoph Waltz, "Basterds" Best Original Screenplay - "Up"
Posts: 1945 | Location: Right behind you. | Registered: December 07, 2007
A link to an article from EW where Dave Karger discusses a possible "ick factor" for An Education as the plot concerns a teenage girl losing her virginity to an older man and how that might affect the Oscar race.
Also within the article are links to interviews between Karger and Carey Mulligan.
A celebration of intellectual curiosity and personal adventure through a portrait of 16-year-old English girl’s questionable romance with a man twice her age, “An Education” is a wonderful film. As a serious student in love with all things French who can’t wait to shake off the constraints of her sheltered suburban London upbringing, circa 1961, Carey Mulligan shines in a captivating performance. Lone Scherfig’s emotionally pulsing, culturally observant picture simply bursts with life, which should translate into a healthy career for Sony Pictures Classics which bought the rights at Sundance.
Based on a memoir by British journalist Lynn Barber, Nick Hornby's droll, insightful script deftly captures the inner life of a cloistered girl selectively aware of the pleasures, both brainy and sensual, awaiting in the larger world, but who remains restricted by her blinkered parents in Twickenham and the constraints of a strict girls' school.
An excellent student, Jenny (Mulligan) knows she'll find what she's looking for if her dream of being accepted into Oxford comes true. But the curtain to the wonders of adult life is pulled back sooner than expected by David (Peter Sarsgaard), a smooth, funny bloke who rolls into her life driving a gorgeous maroon Bristol and soon has her out on the town at smart concerts and clubs rather than lying in her room listening to Juliette Greco records.
David is a self-professed graduate of "the university of life," a man able to charm Jenny's parents into letting him squire their daughter around by flattering her demure mum (Cara Seymour) and connecting man-to-man with her father (Alfred Molina), a loud, small-minded fellow for whom an outing to the West End is an unthinkable as a trip to the moon.
David pals around with a glamorous couple, the dashingly good-looking Danny (Dominic Cooper) and the gorgeous but fearsomely superficial Helen (Rosamund Pike). Claiming he used to study with C.S. Lewis and can get "Clive" to sign a book for Jenny, David persuades her parents to allow him to drive her to Oxford for an overnight trip with his friends.
Sharing a room with his curious but properly wary date, David tries to nudge the relationship into sexual waters but respectfully settles for something romantic for the time being. Some suspicious business-dealings cast the first cloud over David, but what's most important for Jenny is that life is so much more interesting with him around.
At school, Jenny has become quite the jeune fille a la mode, passing out colored Russian cigarettes (everyone smokes madly all the time), cluing in the other girls on the correct interpretation of existentialist notions and deciding to celebrate her rapidly approaching 17th birthday by losing her virginity, preferably on a trip to Paris that David has proposed.
Jenny's naivete and her blindness to what might really be going on eventually fall heavily upon her. But when she sobers up to the full nature of her time with David, the good far outweighs the bad; the film puts great stock in the value of experience, of tasting what life has to offer, of gaining wisdom through trial and error.
There are many reasons -- legal, moral and ethical -- to object to David's opportunistic treatment of his impressionistic young charge. But the film assumes the perspective of its protagonist, that, David's deceptions notwithstanding, he has been someone very much worth knowing for his wit, intelligence and sense of fun.
And this is a film that is nothing if not fun.
Every scene sparkles with spry dialogue, as Jenny navigates her way in the big wide world of exciting, if devious, adults. Pic will remind viewers that, as of 1961-62, England was still stuck in postwar austerity, with the Swinging Sixties a couple of years off. Scherfig, Hornby, lenser John de Borman, production designer Andrew McAlpine, composer Paul Englishby, music supervisor Kle Savidge, costume designer Odile Dicks-Mireaux and all other hands alertly attend to the details of period looks, sounds and attitudes.
In this regard, the pivotal character is Jenny's English teacher Miss Stubbs (a fine Olivia Williams), an attractive woman beneath her prim, spinsterish glasses, garb and stern attitude. Stubbs well perceives the changes in her star student, and their final confrontation is bracingly presented.
Thesping is delicious. Sarsgaard, sporting a decent accent and an ever-present twinkle in his mischievous eyes, marvelously expresses the savoir faire that has such an impact on Jenny. Cooper and Pike suggest the last gasp of overly fussy high style that will soon be replaced by Carnaby Street trendiness, Molina and Seymour aptly fill out their traditional roles, Emma Thompson has a couple of key scenes as the school headmistress, and Matthew Beard is touchingly gawky as a smitten student who realizes Jenny's out of his reach the moment David appears on the scene.
But there's no question of who the star is here. Mulligan, 22 when the picture was shot, is completely convincing as 16 going on 17. Attractive without being a knockout, she tangibly communicates Jenny's thirst for knowledge, her attraction to culture and impatience at conservative ways of thinking and behaving. The way she tosses off little French phrases may be pretentious, but it adorably indicates where her head is. And when she finally gets to Paris and puts up her hair, you could almost swear you're watching Audrey Hepburn skipping through the same streets 50 years ago.
Posts: 27288 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
A very positive review from THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER...
Film Review: An Education By James Greenberg, January 21, 2009 03:25 ET
PARK CITY -- Every now and then a performance comes along that takes Sundance by storm. This year, it's Carey Mulligan's star-making turn as a 16-year-old schoolgirl who falls under the spell an older man in early '60s London in "An Education."
Topped by a fine cast, a first-rate script by Nick Hornby and tight direction by Lone Scherfig, the film is a smart, moving but not inaccessible entry in the coming-of-age canon. Sony Pictures Classics scooped up the picture after a heated bidding war and should do well with its investment.
Scherfig and her team -- production designer Andrew McAlpine and costume designer Odile Dicks-Mireaux -- do a convincing job creating a repressed London still reeling from the war and not yet exploding with the counterculture. It's a period when a seismic shift is just starting to stir.
It's a fearful, drab world, and no one is more bored with it than Jenny (Mulligan), a straight-A student (except for Latin) at a stuffy all-girls school. She's a bright kid with a yearning for culture and all things French. Her ambition is to wear black, smoke cigarettes, read books and try anything new. Enter David (Peter Sarsgaard), a knight in a shining sports car who gives her an education she wasn't expecting.
Their meeting in the pouring rain on a London street is one of the cutest of meet-cutes. A music lover, David tells her to put the cello she's carrying into his car to keep it dry and walk alongside since she surely wouldn't take a ride with a strange man. Who could resist? Certainly not this curious, impressionable girl.
The biggest obstacle to their budding relationship is Jenny's father, Jack (the wonderful Alfred Molina), a strict but loving middle-class parent who remembers the hard times of the war years and only wants the best for his daughter. That means Oxford, and he makes sure, in his sometimes overbearing way, that Jenny has the right extra curricular activities to get in.
Danny is not one of those activities, but he sweet-talks Jack into allowing him to take Jenny to a concert in the West End, which to Jack seems like an exotic place. One thing leads to another, and before long David is taking Jenny off to Oxford for the weekend, which in Jack's distorted vision will be an asset to furthering her education.
The education she is getting has more to do with sultry singers in jazz clubs, fine food and a heretofore unknown world of expensive things. For his part, David is sweet: He's not an ogre, and he respects Jenny's wishes to remain a virgin until she's 17, which is just around the corner. Hornby's script keeps up the character's mystery, and Scherfig wisely doesn't push it. Eventually, what he's up to is revealed, and it's not on the up and up.
But Jenny is smitten and turns 17 in Paris, her dream come true. At that age, a child doesn't have the judgment to see what's happening, and that's where parents should step in, but Jack and his wife (Cara Seymour) are blinded by the upward mobility the noveau riche David represents for the family.
Jenny doesn't understand the subtle class warfare at work here; all she sees is a way out of her dreary life, but perhaps one that threatens her future. Mulligan captures every nuance of the character with an understated charm reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn. Her transformation from an English schoolgirl in a gray uniform to a lovely young and desirable woman is nothing short of miraculous.
But without Sarsgaard's restrained and morally ambiguous performance, Mulligan would not be able to shine as brightly. Dominic Cooper is suitably smarmy as Danny, David's best friend and partner in crime, and Rosamund Pike as his party girl girlfriend is a perfect new role model for Jenny. What makes "An Education" a special piece of work are the social forces going on beneath the surface that inform these all-too-human characters.
Posts: 27288 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Scott Foundas/LA Weekly (published first in sister publication Village Voice) is reasonably favorable:
An Education and Star Carey Mulligan Get Good Marks By Scott Foundas
An Education Directed by Lone Scherfig Sony Pictures Classics Opens October 9 The title is a double entendre in An Education, the film version of British journalist Lynn Barber's memoir about the crash course she received in the "university of life" while studying for her A-levels in early-1960s suburban London. So, too, is Danish director Lone Scherfig's movie something of a deceptively packaged Oscar-season bonbon—a seemingly benign, classily directed year-I-became-a-woman nostalgia trip that conceals a surprisingly tart, morally ambiguous center. A hit at this year's Sundance Film Festival, where it collected the Audience prize for world cinema, An Education arrives in cinemas at a curious moment indeed for a movie about a headstrong 16-year-old who gives herself willingly to a charismatic Jewish hustler more than twice her age. Whatever will the Roman Polanski lynch mob make of that?
The year is 1961, and the place Twickenham, which hasn't yet begun to pivot, let alone swing, much to the frustration of Barber surrogate Jenny (Carey Mulligan), a spirited overachiever who peppers her schoolgirl chitchat with existentialist references and fancies herself a burgeoning Parisian sophisticate in the Juliette Gréco mold. Into Jenny's staid milieu saunters David Goldman (Peter Sarsgaard, doing a passable British accent), a thirtysomething entrepreneur with a purposefully vague CV and a silver-tongued hustle to go with it. Prowling the Twickenham streets in his sleek maroon Bristol, he offers a soggy Jenny a ride home in a downpour and is soon whisking her off to glamorous concerts and art auctions in the company of his "business partner," Danny (Dominic Cooper), and Danny's ditzy girlfriend, Helen (a wonderful Rosamund Pike, doing some Judy Holliday–worthy double takes). Impressionable Jenny soaks it all up, even as she realizes that this latter-day Henry Higgins has visions of something other than a youth orchestra cello planted between her virginal thighs. Slower on the uptake, Jenny's superficially strict parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour) scarcely bat an eye, perhaps sensing that, for a young woman of the era, becoming Mrs. David Goldman might be a perfectly valid alternative to Oxford.
Given that Barber's own résumé runs the gamut from Penthouse contributor to a bestselling sex manual called How to Improve Your Man in Bed, it's hardly surprising that An Education (which was adapted for the screen by novelist Nick Hornby) adopts a laissez-faire attitude toward underage sex and the other rites of passage that most coming-of-age stories treat as sacred rituals. (Upon finally bedding down with her older suitor, Jenny remarks, "All that poetry and all those songs about something that lasts no time at all.") Even as the inevitable fissures begin to form in David's too-good-to-be-true façade, the movie places those personal betrayals in perspective against the considerably more treacherous racial and gender inequalities coursing through British society at the time. When Jenny's kindly English teacher (Olivia Williams) and prim headmistress (Emma Thompson) attempt to hold her to the straight and narrow, she willfully retorts, "It's not enough to educate us anymore. You have to tell us why you're doing it."
Undeniably designed for mass consumption, An Education elides some potentially awkward bits of business (Jenny and David's actual consummation happens off-screen) and uses the forgiving prisms of time and memory to soften a few of its blows. But Barber's elemental tough-mindedness and lack of sentimentality remain constants, as does Mulligan's enchanting central performance.
Twenty-two when the film was shot, with only a handful of minor movie and television appearances behind her, Mulligan doesn't get an entrance here on par with, say, Audrey Hepburn's regal procession in Roman Holiday or Jean Seberg's seaside frolic in Otto Preminger's Bonjour Tristesse—but it doesn't take long for her to cast the same sort of beguiling spell. A petite, round-faced brunette with dimpled cheeks and a darting, fiercely intelligent gaze, Mulligan is on-screen for nearly every frame of An Education, and in those 90-odd minutes, her Jenny seems to transform before us, from girlish insouciance to womanly self-confidence, from intellectual posturing to possessing a finely honed sense of personal taste. Playing a character who is herself a rare bloom in a field of mediocrity, Mulligan has a star quality they can't teach in acting school.
Originally posted by seanflynn: Curiously, Metacritic gives Edelstein's review a 70, meaning they think it is about a 3 star review/favorable.
Ratings like that - and their insistence on using a weighting method that they won't reveal - really should keep people from taking Metacritic ratings with a grain of salt.
Ratings like that - and their insistence on using a weighting method that they won't reveal - really should keep people from taking Metacritic ratings with a grain of salt.
I disagree. They have anomalies like this, but I've seen them correct them.
Rotten Tomatoes is useless by comparison - zero quality control for who's included, and a simple thumbs up/down system that's an insult to critic and reader alike.
I saw it tonight and liked it. Thought Carey Mulligan was excellent in the lead role as the young 16 yr old girl who wants to learn new things and explore the world. Peter Sarsgaard is also very strong as the 35 or so yr old man that courts her. Good techs and a nice score and well directed by Lone Scherfig. Its basically a coming of age story that has some moments that we've seen before but the wonderful prescence of Carey Mulligan is really what makes the film. Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour as her parents offer strong support.
Grade B
Posts: 1850 | Location: NYC | Registered: March 13, 2003
Ratings like that - and their insistence on using a weighting method that they won't reveal - really should keep people from taking Metacritic ratings with a grain of salt.
I disagree. They have anomalies like this, but I've seen them correct them.
Rotten Tomatoes is useless by comparison - zero quality control for who's included, and a simple thumbs up/down system that's an insult to critic and reader alike.
Perhaps. But RT does rank films like Fame, and Love Happens, quite low. But I dont rely on either of them.
Posts: 13982 | Location: canada | Registered: December 22, 2005
But I think you might be forgetting the face-to-face interview. Ratings can be marginally useful as a guideline. But in the end, that human connection`is the best measure. If a film connects with an audience, it's going to succeed.
Posts: 13982 | Location: canada | Registered: December 22, 2005
Ratings like that - and their insistence on using a weighting method that they won't reveal - really should keep people from taking Metacritic ratings with a grain of salt.
I disagree. They have anomalies like this, but I've seen them correct them.
You disagree that they should be taken with a grain of salt? What a strange position to take.
he emotional maturity of a sheltered teen in post-war austerity Britain is thoroughly tested in An Education, Lone Scherfig's vivacious, boldly elemental adaptation of journalist Lynn Barber's unsparing memoir of her formative years. In the post-Absolute Beginners society of 1961 London, where suited dandies in coffee shops bask in a fast-maturing mod culture, precocious 16-year-old Jenny (a bewitching Carey Mulligan) is an outsider enviously peeking in but powerless to shake loose the strictures enforced by her aspirational middle-class parents; they see education as the business of elocution lessons and Latin homework, and hold no opinion on more sensual mind-enrichments like the French blues and Burne-Jones art that hold sway over Jenny. Picked up by the side of the road one rainy day by David (Peter Sarsgaard), a seemingly good Samaritan in a showboat car who expresses concern about her dampening cello, Jenny is soon being regularly chauffeured into a vibrant, almost-swinging London of foreign cinemas, art museums, and after-dinner society. Her dazzlement and uncertain footing in these adult environs is deftly demonstrated in a remarkable supper club scene, where she's the guest and curio of David, as well as his inscrutable friend Danny (Dominic Cooper) and Danny's dimbulb girlfriend Helen (Mulligan's Pride and Prejudice co-star Rosamund Pike, working hard to play dumb). A whirl of sumptuous appointments and beautiful people set the intoxicating mood, while the light conversation allows for an extended focus on a near-bursting with excitement Jenny; her tremulous smile and glistening eyes complement the visual splendor of it all, while from the nearby stage a chanteuse belts out a torch song that deliberately echoes the Juliette Greco records spun in Jenny's bedroom solitude, the result being a convincing appeal for face-to-face engagement with life over settling for a canned experience.
Having rejected out of hand the ordered life on offer from her school's humorless head mistress (a clenched Emma Thompson) and all but told her marm-ish English teacher (Olivia Williams) to drop dead, Jenny rushes headlong into what she imagines will be a life of solidarity with like-minded cosmopolitans seeking to tear down the scaffolding of drab, conventional society, not unlike the pre-Raphaelite group of painters she tends to namedrop when not peppering conversation with French phrases. However, the preference expressed by David and company for collecting over admiring art is an early disappointment and an indicator of her fraternal twinge being misplaced; a visit to an auction house even turns into a macho game, with showoff David empowering and cajoling Jenny to place bids on his behalf, intoxicating her with the thrill of money instead of art. His lesson in the pleasures of bargaining reconvenes in the bedroom, where he agrees to her arbitrary choice to hold onto her virginity until 17, while still negotiating a peek at her breasts, a sordid and juvenile exchange that again hints at the paucity of true feeling between them; his insistence on assigning nicknames for each of them ("Minnie" for her and "Buble-up" for him) is especially galling, with Jenny seeming to mirror the audience's gag-reflex suppression.
Education's central love affair is to be between Jenny and her idealized self-image as an urban cosmopolitan, while David is never closer than on the periphery of her fantasy or her feelings. The personal mystery he works to stoke by deflecting questions about his background (his college was the "university of life" he tells her) holds little appeal for her, with the same going for the opaque business interests that compel him to run strange errands suggestive of a slumlord, such as when he meets a family of black Britons on a street corner to let them into their new flat, while building tenants peep down nervously from high windows. "Schwartzes have to live somewhere," he informs Jenny, her flushed cheeks registering a dawning awareness of the potential chasm between his sophistication and his decency.
Mulligan's performance is a thing of understated beauty, instinctively attuned to that headstrong-but-full-hearted quality common to the most aware teenagers, alight with choices in emotional keys both unexpected and resonant, and ultimately successful enough on its own terms to render superfluous the associative endorsement that Scherfig offers by way of a predictable makeover-revelation moment, in which the frumpy, pale-faced student is reintroduced as a radiant Holly GoLightly. That Mulligan's excess of talent occasionally throws light onto groaningly conventional aspects of Education's storyline is perhaps inevitable, though noticeable, particularly in scenes opposite her stiff upper-lip father (Alfred Molina) and mother (Cara Seymour) which sway unpredictably from broad comedy to indulgent melodrama. Theirs is almost a self-contained B-story unaffected by the main action.
A more successful supporting character is Pike's cabalistic Helen, whose blank expressions directed at Jenny tend to drift into telling daggers aimed at her male companions and who, though sisterly on the surface, remains sufficiently unmoved by the charming kid to not warn her away from their destructive company. Part of what's being concealed here is a penny ante crime racket, with a petty property scam here and the theft of a valuable antique there (Jenny is bluntly told to shut up by the normally gregarious Danny when pushing too hard into that one), but the larger disappointment that's finally arrived at in this affecting personal enlightenment drama is the extent to which even life-lovers and art-lovers are found by our heroine to not be immune to taking monstrous advantage of the uneducated and the easily trusting. That a bright light such as Jenny is found unlikely to remain either for long stands as the film's resigned exhale of a denouement.
Posts: 27288 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Originally posted by seanflynn: Not at all - taking something with a grain of salt means you disregard it and consider it worthless.
Metacritic is far from perfect, but is a generally reliable gauge of major US critical reaction.
That just isn't what taking something with a grain of salt means - it means showing skepticism and not being blindly accepting.
Metacritic can provide a good gauge of general critical reaction, but taking the exact numbers without some degree of skepticism to the point that one believes that, say, a one-point difference in ratings have any meaning is foolish. There is too much measurement error among the ratings and the obscure rating system could have a very significant, but unknown impact.
The good is not the enemy of the perfect, Mysterious Rent.
I find Metacritic to be a reasonably reliable gauge of major US critical reaction. Of course I realize that a 85 and and 83 score is pretty much a tie. But when The Reader is a 58 and gets nominated for best picture, are you saying we should ignore that score when it is the lowest ever to get a BP nomination because Metacritic somehow is not reliable?
It's fine to quibble with their system. But overall I find them reliable enough to use, and will continue to do so. But at the same time, when they seem to be off (for example, the score for the Edelstein Education review), I have no problem pointing it out.
Riding in on waves of raves from film festivals around the world, the exquisitely made British coming-of-age film An Education features, as its centerpiece, a career-breakthrough performance by newcomer Carey Mulligan reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn’s in Roman Holiday. Captivatingly written, directed and acted with sensitivity and nuance, this is one of the best films of the year. It lives up to its title in more ways than one.
Based on a personal memoir by British journalist Lynn Barber, it centers on her teenage experiences in the early 1960s, when she was a bright student cellist in an all-girls school in the Wickenham section of London with her sights set on Oxford. In the film, she is called Jenny, a bright, attractive 16-year-old already drawn to the forbidden Gauloises and depressing Juliette Greco records she hides in her bedroom as part of the hedonistic new postwar permissiveness that is rising all around her. Her strict, bombastic middle-class father (Alfred Molina) and naïve, indulgent mother (Cara Seymour) have big plans for their daughter, but Jenny’s goals take a detour one rainy day when she is given a lift home by a dashing older man with tailored tweeds and impeccable manners, Jewish and in his 30s, named David Goldman (Peter Sarsgaard), whose roguish charm infatuates her. Next comes a flower arrangement, a Ravel concert and a bit of late supper—all romantic attentions that can make a vulnerable schoolgirl dizzy. David is a man of the world—suave, erudite, cool, seductive and such a parent pleaser that even Jenny’s pompous, demanding father puts aside his suspicions and consents to a weekend trip to Oxford under the pretense of introducing Jenny to her literary idol, C. S. Lewis. It takes some time before Jenny realizes her paramour; his best mate, Danny (Dominic Cooper); and Danny’s blousy girlfriend, Helen (Rosamund Pike), are free-wheeling thieves and con artists who stake out old ladies, break into their flats and rob them of their possessions. But the impressionable Jenny is having too much fun to let small, intrusive principles like moral turpitude and high ideals dash her excitement. Soon she’s speeding off in a Bristol roadster soaked in French perfume, smoking imported pink cigarettes from Russia, watching films with subtitles, dining in expensive restaurants and dancing in late-night jazz clubs in Soho. Seduced by the glam life and by David, Jenny loses her virginity on her 17th birthday in a hotel room in Paris, where David has taken her under the pretense of being chaperoned by his “Aunt Helen.” “All that poetry and all those songs—about something that lasts no time at all,” she says the morning after. On the verge of womanhood and jaded overnight, Jenny gives up school and the Oxford entrance exams, to the dismay of her conservative parents and the disapproval of her cold, pragmatic and unforgiving headmistress (Emma Thompson), and prepares to become Mrs. Goldman.
Carefully calibrated by screenwriter Nick Hornby, the stages of Jenny’s saga build to a crashing blow when she discovers at last the dark secret her lover conceals, which wakes her from dreams and kicks her cruelly into the brutal reality of daylight. Jenny’s “education” leaves her older but hardly wiser when she learns the meaning of the word heartbreak. When Jenny regains her senses, there is nothing left to do but sweep the shards of her wasted emotion into the dust bin and start over, but is it already too late?
This is a film that moves you through several emotional riptides without a trace of artifice. The entire cast is superb, but it is Carey Mulligan who sweeps this picture off its feet. An Education is not her first feature (she had a small role in Michael Mann’s Public Enemies and bigger ones in the TV miniseries Bleak House and Pride and Prejudice), but it represents the kind of career-defining break that makes an actor memorable and wins awards. The way Mr. Hornby’s screenplay, under the guidance of Danish director Lone Scherfig (Italian for Beginners), gets the times and attitudes right in the dialogue of everyone from Jenny’s envious classmates to the guileless insincerity of Mr. Wrong (David even feigns Jewish guilt to win over Jenny’s father and get her in the sheets) is invaluable, and I love the attention to detail with which Ms. Scherfig and Mr. Hornby accurately re-create the authenticity of England on the threshold of cultural change and sexual revolution—a time when the pre-Beatles country, like Jenny, was full of innocence and ambition, looking for fun and reckless excitement, and mindless of the consequences. But it is still Ms. Mulligan—a blushing moss rose of a girl in bloom—who personifies the dilemma of a sophisticated, highly educated, beguiling yet immature woman trapped in the unfortunate body of a teenage girl. Like a savory meal too meticulously prepared to wolf down quickly but served in several small but unforgettable courses, it doesn’t give you too much at once. An Education is spread out over less than two hours, but rarefied and entirely delectable from start to finish.
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