An Education

What a completely ordinary movie. Just look at Peter Sarsgaard there, as he endures its crushing banality, obviously in need of a drink before the next symposium on Edith Piaf. Damn it, I expected more from this one. First, it came with all manner of critical guarantees. Then, the film's first half-hour strikes such a brilliant counterpoint between understatement and delay, while the papier-mache plot--I'm not doing the accents, thank you--moves along at so satisfying and disinterested a pace, that I believed my expectation met. Meticulous, bashful, daring, the first third lives up to the hype.

Then comes the dismal sink into tedium. After you spend enough time with these characters, you realize that every one of them, with the lonely exception of Jenny, is void, a fact which leaves me suspicious of the real-life author and journalist on whose memoir this movie is based: was she too substantial a molecule to learn the secrets of the little atoms captured in her orbit? Her parents are trite types with nothing to add but cliche; her friends, then villains, are too friendly, then too villainous. Her lover is, uh, no one, I guess, because we never explore his inner landscape. Not at all. I can't tell you anything about him, and he's deeply embedded not only in the story's mechanics but in the main character's moral, emotional, and spiritual evolution. The longer I watched, the more oblivious and vain her universe seemed to me. Poor Peter Sarsgaard has nothing to do but stand there and fall in love.

Then there's the hollow moralism and faux-feminism; the contrived, even if true--especially if true--happy ending; the lost loose threads, the careless developments, the tasteless, scripted conflicts. I can go on, but you see my point. Nothing marks this movie as exceptional except Carey Mulligan's performance, but unfortunately for Lynn Barber, our memoirist, Jenny just isn't compelling enough to fill the world with life, after she's emptied it of other human beings.

But An Education isn't a bad movie. Let's get that straight. It's a solipsism. There's a difference. C

Slothrop: We always knew Koko was full of fuming monkey hatred towards the fairer sex.

Koko: Nuts.