For the most part, I don’t like contemporary horror movies, but then
I may just be too sensitive to enjoy the pastoral image of a woman
being fed into a food processor by a man in a clown mask. I accept that
this is a matter of taste, and that perfectly decent people who never
compare universal health care to Nazi concentration camps can, and do,
enjoy spending evenings eating popcorn while looking at scenes of
simulated and sexualized vivisection.
My biggest problem with horror movies, though, is that I do like scary movies, and I just don’t find horror films to be very scary.
But An Education, which is ostensibly a cautionary
romance/coming-of-age film, is terrifying. It’s the most effectively
frightening film I’ve seen since that Larry King/Tom DeLay sex video
was accidentally shown on Oprah.
An Education is, nonetheless, not a horror movie. Rather,
it’s a memoir of a few months in the life of Jenny Miller (Carey
Mulligan), a 16-year-old girl living outside of London in the early
1960s. Her middle-class parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour) want
her to go to Oxford, because they think that’s where you meet rich men
who know how to pronounce “Alcibiades.” Jenny follows along with their
plan by studying hard, learning to play the cello so she’ll have an
outside interest to put on her college application, and avoiding
England’s most common malady: Guinness-induced pregnancy.
Then she meets David (Peter Sarsgaard), a much-older man, and she
acquires special feelings in her schoolgirl skirt. It’s Sarsgaard’s
performance as the suspiciously charming David that takes An
Education from quaint coming-of-age drama to shivering festival of
apprehension. While Jenny falls in love with him, and David seems to
reciprocate, there’s an overwhelming sense that something is terribly
wrong—and not just because David is old enough to be her father’s
creepy best friend. Sarsgaard creates a feeling of horrifying and
immense danger by virtue of his calm, creepy and compelling delivery.
When he enters the film, there’s an overwhelming sense that horror is
about to unfold.
Jenny gets drawn into the wealth and glamour that surround David and
his two associates: an upper-crusty collector of beautiful things named
Danny (Dominic Cooper), and Danny’s couture-covered and semi-literate
arm-piece Helen (Rosamund Pike). While David and his pals all have a
vaguely criminal air to them, that doesn’t account for the sense of
danger. Instead, there’s just something consistently and vaguely wrong,
with suspicions increasing at each turn. It’s a testament to director
Lone Scherfig that she could create this suspense without clearly
implying what it is that one should fear from David. Scherfig is helped
immensely by Sarsgaard’s performance, and also, I assume, by the fact
that her name is “Lone Scherfig.”
But what really brings the horror home is the way the movie seems to
be struggling between two genres. On the one hand, there’s the lovely
tale of Jenny’s schooldays and the oh-so-handsome man with his posh
motorcar who actually seems to be interested in more than her anatomy.
And then there’s the lurking horror. This creates a series of
back-and-forth motions: At one moment, David has the smiling intensity
of a rapist, but a minute later, he’s given the opportunity for
violence and violation, and instead starts speaking in baby-talk and
engaging in innocent cuddling—which is both a relief from the
tension that preceded it, and somehow even creepier and more
suspenseful.
These twists make An Education weirdly disorienting but also
compelling. Nick Hornby, of High Fidelity and About a
Boy, wrote the script, but whereas his earlier films are focused on
male characters, Education is really about the psyche of young
Jenny. Hornby adapted the memoir by Lynn Barber, and much of the story
is, ostensibly, based on real events.
Whether the events are real or not, the odd thing is how real they
feel. This is unusual in a film, because, in general, lives don’t have
plots, so the very thing that makes most movies interesting—the
connectedness and direction of their stories—is what makes them
seem fake. With An Education, there is no plot, only the motion
of growing up. The viewer is pulled along not by the narrative
connection of events, but by the hints they leave about a possible
story lurking behind the random occurrences.
When the end does come, it’s unexpected and perhaps not as
satisfying as the buildup implied. But it’s still effective, and with
Mulligan and Sarsgaard giving overwhelmingly strong performances, and
the neat direction of Lone Scherfig, Education fails to deliver
clichés or stock scenarios; yet, somehow, the film succeeds at
being entertaining.
This article appears in Nov 12-18, 2009.
