Old Yorker

Lone Scherfig (2009)

It’s a good film; with more thoughtful and tougher writing, it could have been a small classic.   From a screenplay by Nick Hornby which is based on a memoir by the journalist Lynn Barber, An Education is set in London in 1961.   Jenny is sixteen going on seventeen and an only child.  She lives with her parents in Twickenham and goes to an independent school in the area.   (Barber herself attended the Lady Eleanor Holles School in Hampton.)  It’s a lower middle-class family with no personal experience of higher education.  Jenny’s very bright and wants to get into Oxford; her father wants that too.   She also plays in a youth orchestra; returning from a rehearsal one day, she and her cello are caught in a rain shower and she accepts a lift from a man in a swanky car.  His name is David, he looks to be in his thirties and, after asking about Jenny and her academic ambitions, he introduces himself as a graduate of ‘the university of life – I didn’t get a very good degree’. The film tells the story of Jenny’s relationship with David.  It describes the tension between what she thought she wanted and what she thinks David can offer her, between academic and sentimental educations.

Jenny is in conflict with her father Jack virtually throughout the film – and one of the shortcomings of Nick Hornby’s script is that he doesn’t address the irony of Jenny’s and her father’s ambitions continuing to converge.  At the start, they’re both determined that she go to Oxford, which Jenny sees as opening up huge new possibilities – as a way out of timid, stultifying suburban life – and which Jack sees as a passport to a socially advancing marriage.  Once Jenny has fallen for David, she begins to regard university as another part of the boring, deadend world – the spinster teachers at her school are graduates and look what happened to them.  She wants instead to marry a man who can offer excitement and pleasure.  David has impressed Jack and a ‘good’ marriage was the ultimate purpose of Jenny’s going to Oxford; so there’s no argument between father and daughter about the change of plan.  If we got the sense that Jenny’s vexation with Jack was fuelled by her awareness that they desired the same things, but for very different reasons, An Education would be a stronger drama.  If we were made to think that Jenny was a natural rebel, we could believe that too (even though it’s what we’d expect from a coming-of-age story).  As it is, she seems to oppose her father for no more interesting reason than that he’s a blinkered, pompously blustering fool.

The script really has it in for Jack.  It’s not enough for him to be a parent insensitively pushing their child to achieve what they themselves couldn’t have:  he has a cravenly retrogressive ulterior motive.  When things fall apart – after Jenny has burned her boats at school and David is revealed to be a married man – Jack and Jenny have a conversation through her closed bedroom door in which he explains that ‘I’ve always been frightened –   I didn’t want you to be frightened’.  (This self-justification made me even less convinced that small-minded Jack would want Jenny to go to Oxford in the first place – he’d surely be worried that the type of professional man she should be trying to catch would prefer an ornamental wife and might be put off by a girl who was too clever by half.)   From this point on, Hornby draws a veil over what Jack wants and Jenny’s feelings about him.  Jenny studies privately for Oxford with the help of Miss Stubbs, the English teacher from her school (whose headmistress won’t take Jenny back for a repeat year).   When a letter arrives from Oxford, Jenny opens it and leaves the breakfast table without saying a word.  Jack daren’t look at the letter and passes it to his wife.  That’s the last we see of him.

Nick Hornby may feel he can justify his characterisation of Jack through the ‘true story’ argument – that this is how Lynn Barber presents her father.  I assume that this part of Barber’s autobiography describes adolescent experiences both distinctive and which serve to illustrate the broader social and sexual constraints operating in the world she grew up in.  I doubt if her memoir is so sketchy that she doesn’t say what her father’s job was – but only what sort of job it was:  in An Education, beyond a single reference to a man ‘at the office’, we never find out what Jack does.  This sort of lack of detail reinforces the impression that Hornby is meaning to create a generic figure, a representative voice of his time and place.  The father’s instant acceptance of marriage instead of university feels wrong too:  even if a wealthy husband is what he thinks Jenny should end up with, Jack’s too conservative a man to embrace change in the course of helping his wife Marjorie with the washing up.

The father’s character – both overwritten and underwritten – is the main weakness of the script and Alfred Molina, who plays Jack, is the weak link in the cast.    Molina is an enjoyably broad actor at best and his histrionics here expose the artificiality of the role.   The household would have been more compelling and believable if Jack had been less noisy and demonstrative – if he had imposed his authority through insidious force of personality rather than a loud voice.   I can see, though, that this would also have been a greater commercial risk.  The audience in the Richmond Filmhouse responded enthusiastically to Molina.  (And it would be no surprise to see him up for awards for this:  a self-deluding windbag who gives the heroine a hard time but eventually and tearfully sees the error of his ways is always popular; and Molina has been around long enough for plenty of people to think an honour is overdue.)

If Hornby has been faithful to the source material, it’s surprising that he’s jettisoned elements which you assume were present in the original and which might have filled the unconvincing gaps in the screen story.  If Jack is the controlling parent we’re meant to think he is, he seems remarkably incurious about David’s credentials as a suitable match for his daughter.  Jack wouldn’t be taken in by a slick personality; he’d want to know, with good evidence, what David did for a living, what security he could offer Jenny.  Unless Jack sees David from the start as a prospective son-in-law (and he clearly doesn’t), why does he let Jenny go out on so many dates when she should have her nose in a Latin dictionary?  The script is full of these holes.  Jenny discovers David’s duplicity by chance, when she finds mail addressed to ‘Mr and Mrs David Goldman’ in the glove compartment of his car.  If these are personal letters to David and his wife, why would he take them out of the house?  If the envelopes are supposed to contain unpaid bills, is it likely that in 1961 these would be addressed to a couple rather than to the man of the house (who appears to be the sole breadwinner)?  The address on the correspondence reveals that David and his wife live a few streets away from Jenny’s family.  Has no one in the neighbourhood ever recognised him, in his comings and goings, as a local – or his car, which we’re led to believe is an unusual one?  Where does Jenny think he lives anyway?

Other elements of the script are more intriguingly unclear – questions of David’s cultural frame of reference and the depth of Jenny’s passion for the arts.  She’s aiming to do an English degree (and needs Latin as a compulsory element of Oxford entrance) but at the start of An Education she’s already independently well-read and enthusiastic about French literature, music and films.  (Where a carefully supervised teenager in Twickenham would have been seeing these films half a century ago isn’t explained.)   Even allowing for Jenny’s exaggerating how much she knows about and has experienced these things, we accept that they matter to her.  David persuades her parents to let him take her to Oxford for the weekend on the basis that he’s visiting his old tutor there – C S Lewis, no less.  You assume that Jenny and David have concocted this pretext between them (her parents know Lewis as the author of the Narnia books their daughter loved) yet Jenny looks astonished that David has told Jack and Marjorie that he himself was at Oxford – this makes it seem that the Lewis line-shooting is all his own work.   Their first date, with David’s friends Danny and Helen, is at a Ravel concert at St John’s in Smith Square.  I assumed that David calculated that this was the best way of pursuing a relationship with Jenny after the cello-based pickup but I then became unclear whether he was really interested in classical music (you’re left in no doubt that Danny and Helen are not).

The evidence of where we usually see Jenny and David together once the romance is underway suggests that he is not a culture vulture.   They go to bars and restaurants, to the properties which David and Danny are acquiring by underhand means, to Walthamstow dogs, where the two men are to meet an associate.  If an objet d’art is on the agenda, the agenda is commercial and/or criminal – there’s a sequence at an auction for a Burne-Jones painting (Jenny loves the Pre-Raphaelites ‘but not Holman Hunt’), another involving the theft of an antique map from an elderly woman’s house.  All this left me unsure, when Jenny tells her parents about going to concerts and the cinema and so on with David, whether this was true.  If it was, it seemed to suggest that David shared Jenny’s cultural appetite (but there’s no real evidence that he does).  If it wasn’t, are we supposed to think that Jenny has lost interest in the arts as well as academic work by this stage?

The vagueness of David’s cultural credentials proves effective, however, because it becomes part of the rich elusiveness of the man created by Peter Sarsgaard, in a brilliant performance (unlikely to win awards because it’s so subtle and complex).   There are many elements to this characterisation.  Sarsgaard’s nationality is one of them:  he handles the English accent so well that it would be hard to discern he was American if you didn’t already know it – yet Sarsgaard’s slight carefulness helps to give David’s voice a deracinated quality, the sense of a displaced person.   David is Jewish and this quality gives an odd resonance to Jack’s careless use of the phrase ‘wandering Jew’ (applied to Graham the (gentile) schoolboy who’s keen on Jenny).  We never know David’s exact age; Sarsgaard (who is thirty-eight) combines a face that can look boyish with a middle-aged stockiness.  This keeps you wondering how much too old for Jenny David might be thought to be.  Sarsgaard gives David real wit and charm – but in combination with a needy, ashamed quality, and a startling immaturity.  When he justifies to Jenny the way he makes his money (apart from fencing stolen goods, he and Danny buy properties cheaply from racist senior citizens anxious to get out of an area before the blacks move in – then rent the properties to new immigrants), he’s very plausible.

Jenny is clear she doesn’t want to have sex until her seventeenth birthday:  David respects her wishes while continuing to exploit her and Sarsgaard conveys this with extraordinary delicacy.  (The moment when David asks Jenny to bare her breasts, looks at then covers them again, is one of the best in the film.)  The Filmhouse audience found the layered ambiguity of this portrait unsettling.  There was something like a collective sigh of relief when David was revealed to be married; when Jenny insists that he explain himself to her parents and gives him a moment to get the Dutch courage needed for that and we then hear the rotter’s car driving off; when she visits his home to discover that he has a child and to learn from his wife that he’s a serial seducer and that some of his previous conquests have ended up pregnant.  While David’s being married isn’t unconvincing (he’s obviously sexually experienced), it comes almost as an anti-climax because Sarsgaard has made what is shady about the character so fascinatingly hard to pin down.

You remember the BBC’s Bleak House in 2005 chiefly for Anna Maxwell Martin’s superb Esther Summerson.  Carey Mulligan was strikingly charming in the smaller part of the orphan Ada Clare – even so, her breakthrough here as Jenny is amazing.  Of course, it’s a dream part for a young actress:  Jenny is witty, willful, spirited, sexy, an exploited innocent; she goes from school uniform to a romantic weekend/sexual initiation in Paris; her world collapses then she achieves a happy ending.  I was knocked out by Mulligan’s intelligence and expressivity.  Suggestions that she’s the (latest) new Audrey Hepburn are wide of the mark (and probably wouldn’t have been made at all if Jenny hadn’t crossed the Channel) but that’s because of qualities that Mulligan has – like a prickly intelligence – as much as ones she lacks.  She has a star presence – as well as being very pretty, she’s got real warmth and she can say an awful lot in her eyes.  Mulligan is twenty-four but I’d no problem believing Jenny was in her late teens:  the make-up and costumes (by Odile Dicks-Mireaux) obviously help but it’s Mulligan’s empathy which is crucial.  She respects and engages with her character’s self-image of sophistication and the brittleness of that sophistication.  As a result, the quality of knowingness is always the character’s, never the actress’s, and Jenny is fascinatingly poised between self-possession and vulnerability.  Mulligan is good at getting across the girl’s native daring and how quickly she registers the implications of impulsive actions (as in the scene when David prompts her to start bidding for the Burne-Jones).  Her line readings are fresh but incredibly polished; she’s very skilled at giving inflections that seem to send different messages (like the morning after Jenny loses her virginity and remarks on how quickly it was all over – with a hint of calm relief and a larger sense of puzzled disappointment).  Even when Alfred Molina is baring his soul on the other side of the bedroom door, Mulligan keeps things interesting:  she shows you that Jenny is crying from a mixture of feelings – that her life’s gone wrong and out of compassion for what she now sees as her father’s clumsy, decent intentions.

When the actors are as good as this, they can both distract you from the inadequacies of the writing but also increase your frustration with it because you can see how much further they could go.  Emma Thompson, in spite of the obviousness of what she’s given to say, is splendid as the anti-Semitic headmistress – not just in the incisiveness of her readings but in the way she looks too:  Thompson incarnates precisely a distinctive but recognisable figure of the era – the well-heeled professional woman who is glamorous yet decidedly unmarried.   As a more physically conventional spinster, Olivia Williams is expert at conveying there’s more to the English teacher Miss Stubbs than meets the eye:  once the character is required to tell us what lies beneath the almost masochistic plainness of her appearance, she inevitably becomes less interesting.   As Jenny’s mother, Cara Seymour matches up well physically with Carey Mulligan – you can see the smile and charm from twenty years ago under the mousy housewife that Marjorie’s become.   Rosamund Pike is excellent as the cheerfully amoral (and nonchalantly philistine) Helen – again because the performer doesn’t condescend to or offer a sarcastic commentary on the character.  The same can’t be said for Dominic Cooper as Danny, although I disliked him less here than in previous roles.   The scenes at Jenny’s home involving the hapless Graham are insultingly crude:  he can’t pick up a piece of Battenburg cake or speak a sentence without making a fool of himself but Matthew Beard still suggests a likeable, honest intelligence that transcends the way the part’s written.   Jenny’s two school contemporaries are played by Amanda Fairbank-Hynes and Ellie Kendrick (who was so good as Anne in the BBC dramatisation of The Diary of Anne Frank earlier this year).  The avid naivety of these two actually gets across Jenny’s young age very effectively.  Sally Hawkins registers strongly in her one scene as David’s coolly long-suffering wife.

The Danish director Lone Scherfig orchestrates the performances very well:  she’s highly sensitive to the timing of pauses and the nuances of spoken English.  As far as I could tell, the details that establish the period setting, in terms of design and decoration and the choice of pop songs, are exactly right.  An Education is very entertaining and rarely flags, although on the rare occasions that it does the longueurs seem greater because you remember the shallowness of the script (and the film seems to be marking time before something else predictable happens or is said).  Scherfig is defeated by, and loses her sureness of touch in, some of the worst conceived scenes and passages of dialogue.   There are five relatively long monologues – two for each of Jack and Jenny and one for David – of which only two come off.  One of the successful ones is David’s justifying his line of work to Jenny – the length of the monologue is justified because you see him working on her and see her gradually capitulating.  Alfred Molina goes over the top in the father’s money-doesn’t-grow-on-trees rant and the through-the-bedroom-door sequence is too long.  (The concluding shot in this sequence, of a plate of biscuits, is also too pat – the three custard creams are virtually captioned ‘emblems of the beige paltriness of petit-bourgeois sensibility’.)

Jenny’s first monologue – when, in the headmistress’s study, she inveighs against the tedium of academic study and the state of England – doesn’t work because Scherfig turns it into a soliloquy.  It’s hard enough to believe that Jenny would be allowed to go on for so long without interruption; it becomes incredible when the camera stays on Jenny so that we can’t even see the headmistress’s silent response.   But the final monologue works well.  Jenny gets a place at Oxford and her voiceover explains what it was like going there and going out with boys (‘And they really were boys’) and mentions how she turned down an invitation to go to Paris.   At first, you wonder why she didn’t apply eventually to Cambridge rather than Oxford – to which, as Jenny’s parents eventually discover, C S Lewis migrated in the mid-1950s and where Miss Stubbs got her degree.  But then you realise that Jenny’s sticking with Oxford makes sense.  It illustrates a wry, stubborn determination that the experience of David, however much it now colours her life, isn’t going to ruin it.

31 October 2009