peteg's blog - noise - movies - 2018 12 25 AnEducation

An Education

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It's 1961 in Twickenham. Apparently affluent charming playboy Peter Sarsgaard picks up final year schoolgirl Carey Mulligan, and her aspirational parents (unpersuasive Alfred Molina, girlish Cara Seymour) approve of her throwing away Oxford in favour of marriage. Predictable outcomes ensue. There's some useful friction with the older Ms Gone Girl Rosamund Pike, born to it. Olivia Williams, the concerned Miss English Teacher, needs a tango lesson. Emma Thompson plays the headmistress to type. Sally Hawkins is squandered as a suburban wife.

It's not so much Lolita as an expansion and coy dilution of the Diana subthread of Trainspotting; Mulligan even gets in a Renton-style spray about how shite it is to be English, so boring, such limited prospects for women, even with a degree. There's a daft scene at a dog track: of course after her dog comes in she gets proposed to in the parking lot. All the furniture of one of David Lynch's small-town efforts is there, minus the weird; Beth Rowley smokes as a nightclub singer. As for coming-of-age movies, you'd be better off watching something that involves real skill, like surfing. The saccharine tacked-on happy ending emphasises the lack of conviction in all that came before.

A. O. Scott. Dana Stevens.