Chattanooga Pulse

Embedded in my childhood is the fuzzy memory of a VHS tape called Mr. T’s Be Somebody…or Be Somebody’s Fool.  It was your typical star-studded 1980s public service announcement for kids, in which Mr. T, sporting an array of cutoffs and mounds of gold chains, extolled the virtues of resisting peer pressure, respecting one’s mother, and, of course, getting a proper education.

Invoking his famous catchphrase, Mr. T made his purpose clear in the opening musical number: “If you don’t want to be a crazy fool, you better study real hard and stay in school!”

Lone Scherfig’s new film An Education (this week’s selection in the AEC’s Independent Film Series) isn’t as bleedingly obvious as Mr. T, but both films are PSAs for the same message: Stay in school and life will be better!

Jenny Miller (Carey Mulligan) is a bright 16-year-old girl with high hopes of going to Oxford to read English after graduation.  It’s the ’60s, and she lives in a suburb of London with her stodgy father and complacent mother (Alfred Molina and Rosamund Pike) who dream of her Oxford future in even more vivid terms than she.

While waiting in the rain for a bus one afternoon after orchestra rehearsal, Jenny is greeted by David (the perpetually dull Peter Saarsgaard), a man twice her age who idles his maroon Bristol in front of the stop.

Soft-spoken and witty, he rolls down the window and says, “If you had any sense, you wouldn’t take a lift from a strange man, but I’m a music lover and I’m worried about your cello.”  He proposes that she put the instrument in his car and walk alongside, but Jenny eventually hops in the vehicle for a ride home.

As luck would have it, she sees David again while walking home with friends the next day and he invites her to an evening classical music concert with two of his friends.  “I won’t allow it!” her father bellows from the dinner table later on, but David works his considerable charm on the old codger and is given permission to whisk Jenny away for the evening.

This is Jenny’s first experience of David’s world of high culture, rich food, beautiful clothes, and classy friends; she is immediately taken in.  Her flights of fancy with David continue and the inevitable romance between the two of them takes wing even as she notices that he is involved in a handful of illegal activities.

The evening adventures and weekend getaways continue and Jenny is soon faced with the inescapable choice that Nick Hornby’s screenplay has been building toward since the first line of dialogue: Will Jenny continue her education and go to Oxford or flee to a world of freedom with David and his posse?

An Education is an odd choice for director Lone Scherfig, who previously worked with the Dogma 95 movement, an avant-garde filmmaking cabal that seeks to strip away artifice and show life as it is.  Her film Italian for Beginners is a quiet, witty romantic comedy that employs a hand-held camera quite deliberately, but Scherfig’s direction in An Education is nowhere near as fluid, relying on predictable two-shot editing and elementary compositions in which characters rarely leave the center of the frame.

Her direction is the very definition of boring and would threaten to make An Education a jumbled mess if it weren’t for Carey Mulligan’s performance as Jenny, which binds the film’s disparate threads loosely together. As Jenny’s exploits with David move toward her seventeenth birthday—the day for which she is saving her virginity—Mulligan shows Jenny becoming worlds more self-aware. The brainy child from the film’s beginning emerges from her cocoon of innocence as a worldly young woman greeted with choices that will shape her future.

And there’s the rub: An Education implores its audience to believe that education is more valuable for a young person’s life than endless frivolity, but Jenny’s adventures with David—even after we learn that he’s a selfish cad—always seem more fun.  Her well-intentioned advisors at school effuse wisdom from behind their horn-rimmed glasses, but clearly lead prosaic lives with no hint of adventure.   It might be enough to cajole Jenny into doing the right thing, but she’ll be the only one.

We can look forward to Carey Mulligan’s future in better films with hope that she’ll be a true star, but when it comes to steering young people off the street and into the classroom, Mr. T will always do it better.

An Education
Directed by Lone Scherfig
Starring Carey Mulligan, Peter Saarsgaard, Alfred Molina, Rosamund Pike
Rated PG-13
Running time: 1 hour 55 seconds