The Last Movie I Saw

Yesterday I wrote about Pirate Radio, a British movie set in the sixties about (partly) a young man's coming of age working on the titular vessal. The same day, I also saw An Education, a British movie set in the sixties about a young woman's coming of age working her way through school with aspirations of going on to Oxford. As mentioned in the earlier post, Pirate Radio was not very good, but nonetheless somewhat likeable. An Education is much better if ultimately kind of inconsequential in its lesson (such as it is). Directed by Lone Scherfig (apparently her first English-language film) and written by Nick Hornby (who I'm convinced is incapable of turning out anything less than interesting), An Education is much better constructed than the other movie, and the performances by Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina, and especially Carrie Mulligan as the main character, Jenny, are first-rate across the board. As the plot unfolds, the precocious Jenny seeks to define her future on her own terms (as opposed to those laid down by her father and teachers), and siezes on the opportunities represented by her older "boyfriend" David (Sarsgaard), who it turns out is manipulating her in his own quietly selfish way. The trajectory of this smart girl's seduction into David's world-- a world she covets even before she meets him-- and the subsequent revelation of his betrayal could be the stuff of lurid melodrama or exploitation. But Scherfig and Hornby keep this on a realistic, human scale, which plays out less in histrionics than the slow concession to the sort of personal compromises that most of us accept in the face of unanticipated setbacks. That's what I mean by the film being somewhat inconsequential: it's an interesting, even compelling story, well told and well-acted. But in the end it's hard to see that it really stands out as anything more than that, since the consequences of the climactic revelation merely reaffirm notions most of us would accept as common knowledge, reflecting the all-too-familiar expectations we have about "playing with fire." That's actually consistent with Hornby's fiction generally, which hardly effects it's entertainment value (his novel Slam has much in common with this film, for example), but for some reason I was led to expect something more-- although I'm hard-pressed to say exactly what that was. On balance, it was a good film, and I'd see it again, if only for the combination of good qualities that pulled me in and made me interested in the outcome, even if that outcome itself was something less than spectacular.