CS Weekly Archive > Weekend Read > 10/9/09

A Teachable Moment

By peter clines

The novelist behind About a Boy and High Fidelity dons his screenwriting cap for the first time in over a decade to tell a somewhat familiar biographical story about love, responsibility, and unhappy endings.

An Education

Nick Hornby

Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is the brilliant and beautiful teenage star of her post-war London school, and she's all but guaranteed the Oxford education her stern parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour) have been grooming her for since an early age…no matter what her own wants and dreams may be. Enter David (Peter Sarsgaard), a music lover who gives Jenny and her cello a ride home one rainy afternoon. David is funny, very well-off…and in his 30s. Yet he still charms her parents and leads an all-too-willing Jenny into the luxurious circles of society she's always dreamed of—a world of music, art, and travel. Even when she learns that David's motives (and his means of supporting himself) aren't entirely innocent, she still can't give up the world she's wanted to be a part of her whole life. Of course, as more people discover her questionable love affair and more truths about David begin to pile up, the real question isn't if she can stay in this new life, but if she'll ever be allowed back in her old one.

Loosely based on an autobiographical piece by British journalist Lynn Barber, An Education has moral issues aplenty, and there's almost a grim synchronicity in its release just as Roman Polanski finds himself the center of attention again. To its credit, the screenplay by Nick Hornby (Fever Pitch) pulls off an amazing balancing act. What would seem like a black-and-white matter of assigning blame for this doomed relationship actually becomes a vast field of gray. There's no question that David should know better, and so some of the blame has to go to him. Yet there's also no denying that this story is not so much about him seducing Jenny as it is her lunging at what he has to offer. This is Jenny's chance to get what she's always wanted, and she's willing to do most anything to get it and keep it. There's probably a fair argument to be made that she blackmails David with sex to get a trip to Paris on her birthday. Then there are Jenny's parents, who not only allow this relationship with a man twice their daughter's age, but are almost pushing her into it at points. There's enough guilt to go around for everyone. Indeed, when Jenny goes running to David's friend and partner in crime, Danny (Dominic Cooper), blaming him for hiding certain facts she deserved to know, he quickly cuts her off with "You know, if we're going to have that conversation…" Unlike Barber's autobiography, in which she makes herself out to be the no-longer-innocent victim of everyone else's awful judgment, Hornby's protagonist shares responsibility for the tangled mess her life becomes.

In an odd way, though, this lack of absolutes does reflect a larger problem. While it is superbly told, the story of the good girl who gives up everything for the bad boy isn't exactly new, and Jenny follows a path of self-destruction that doesn't have any real surprising turns in it. She acts superior to her friends, she denigrates her favorite teacher (Olivia Williams), and she tosses aside the future she'd been fighting tooth and nail for just a few months earlier. As mentioned above, we all know it's a doomed relationship from the start, so it just becomes a question of how deep a hole will Jenny dig herself into? Which revelation about David will be the final straw? Because the ending's so clear, it starts to dominate the second half of the movie as we wonder if each scene is going to be "it" rather than concentrating on the scene itself. When we do reach the end, it's been sapped of a lot of its strength because we've seen it coming for so long. Hornby's a strong writer with sharp dialogue, so this isn't a crippling problem, but it does have a habit of hanging there in plain sight.

And maybe that's okay. In a story about such a flawed first love, there really only can be one ending, even if that ending isn't a perfect one. After all, if it was perfect, it wouldn't end, would it?

An Education
Sony Classics
Rated PG-13; 95 min.

Peter Clines grew up in the Stephen King fallout zone of Maine and made his first writing sale at age 17 to a local newspaper. He currently lives somewhere in southern California, and can often be found ranting on his cleverly named blog, Writer on Writing . His first novel, Ex-Heroes, will be released in fall 2009.




An Education courtesy Sony Classics

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