DVD Review #35 An Education

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An Education (2009) Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard Directed By Lone Scherfig

This is #9 on the Academy Award Best Picture Nominated films list (just The Blind Side to go now) and similar to the last film I watched (A Serious Man), I was glad I waited because this movie did little for me. The Screenplay (which is based on a Lynn Barber Memoir) was written by Nick Hornby, who wrote the best movie of the last decade (check the list on the sidebar!!), About a Boy, which raised my expectations a bit…then I remembered he more recently wrote Fever Pitch (they can’t all be gems), so that brought them back down…and even with tempered expectations, I still wasn’t overjoyed with this film. An Education was a bit of a chore to get through. What’s worse than its snail like pace, is that it has almost no likable characters in it. In addition to those flaws, I found it way too smart for its own good (or I may dumb…that’s possible), because it contained way too many clever, yet snarky racist comments that were too old and too British for me to comprehend…oh well, it is not as bad as A Serious Man…so that makes it the second worst of the 10 Nominees thus far.

An Education is the coming of age tale of young Jenny (played by Academy Award nominated actress and newcomer Carey Mulligan) who is a perfect student, on her way to Oxford, when she meets a mysterious new man who sweeps her off her feet while simultaneously shattering her predictable and perfect world. This man, David (played by an annoying Peter Sarsgaard) is the man in question, and although their love is at times attractive…I was never able to get over the simple fact that Jenny is 16 and David is somewhere around 30+…and seriously in the film it looks worse…it makes it uncomfortable in my humble view. Now to make matters worse David is a bullshit artist who at no time really makes it charming, he just makes it creepy. The bright spot for me in the film is Alfred Molina who plays Jenny’s dad…but the problem there is he is a worrying bigot, who unbelievably falls for the charms of an un-charming David…I don’t know, I feel bad because I didn’t hate the film, but I can’t bring myself to recommend it. I think it’s very average, and I can’t believe it was nominated over (500) Days of Summer…A much better movie.

(The Shawshank Scale 1-10) An Education gets the same lackluster mark as A Serious Man, a 5.5 on the scale…even though it is a touch better than that…I think women will like it more than men, and I also think that some of those women who like it will also fall asleep once or twice while watching it. (that said maybe I just didn’t get it).