Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
About A Girl
(An Education, 11/23/09)
By Nicholas Nicastro
If
there's a better British example of a career-making role than that given
to young Carey Mulligan in An Education, you'd probably have
to go back to Alfie in 1966, which made a star out of a Cockney
bloke named Michael Caine. Indeed, Alfie is set just after the
time portrayed in An Education, at the dawn of a sexual revolution
fostered by practical contraception and that ended (with a decisive
slam) with AIDS. Jenny, the teenaged character played by Mulligan,
doesn't exactly get around like Alfie does, but it is—as they say—different
for girls. But she's every bit as delightful as her predecessor.
The clever, attractive Jenny is
the only daughter in a family of modest means living in the colorless
outskirts of the capital. Her father (Alfred Molina) wants her to go
to Oxford (but, strangely, not Cambridge)—an ambition she
has embraced and has every likelihood of reaching. She has every likelihood,
that is, until she meets David (Peter Sarsgaard), a fellow ten years
older who has a nice car and lots of connections in the swankiest corners
of swinging London. With his deep pockets and fine manners, David gives
Jenny another sort of education in what he calls "the university
of life." Jenny, who has bohemian pretensions, is naturally smitten,
But of course, David has secrets.
Granted, a short summary of the
story—based a memoir by Lynn Barber—doesn't suggest there's
much new in a film whose prospects are hardly brightened by its blah
title. True, screenwriter Nick Hornby (About A Boy) and Danish
director Lone Schefig hardly strike an inauthentic moment, and Sarsgaard
can't be faulted for his portrayal of a subtly brutal cad. Alas, there's
no kind of drabness quite like the British middle-class kind, with its
council houses and pro forma politeness and compulsory tea breaks.
(Those who have faced watching a stack of Ken Loach films know what
I'm talking about.)
All of this plainness works perfectly
here, however, because it's like the simple black frame around a winning
portrait by Mulligan. Until now, she's been known primarily for a few
small roles in costumiers like the 2005 BBC version of Bleak House
and the Keira Knightley Pride and Prejudice. This is certain
to change. As the alternately wise and foolish Jenny, she's like what
all of us imagine when envisioning any of the classic British literary
heroines. Mulligan has the kind of face that seems to embody all the
best aspects of every stage of life, from the promise of youth to—with
that wry mouth—the knowing bemusement of age. The little of bit
of unfairness at the root of the story, that beauty (and more specifically,
female beauty) can alone invite entrée into whole worlds of experience
is glaringly obvious here, but watching her, we can't manage to object.
Can Mulligan as Jane Eyre, or Mulligan as anybody by Jane Austen, be
far away?
©2009 Nicholas Nicastro
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