(Also known as the latest in an ongoing series which should be titled You Know That Movie Everyone Else Saw Six Months Ago? Yeah, I Just Watched It.)

Actually, let’s get the review part out of the way: For a movie with a familiar, arguably tired narrative, wow is it good. Somehow, no matter how many times I’ve watched or read the young-girl-seduced-by-older-man-who-appears-charming-and-glamourous-simply-because-he’s-not-part-of-her-normal-world plot, I felt as though I were watching something new and different this time. I’m not really sure why that is, but I’m willing to put it down to the script and the cast and the fact that there isn’t a hair out of place.

Everyone talks about Carey Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard and Emma Thompson and Alfred Molina, and rightly so, but my favorite performance in An Education was Olivia Williams’ turn as the spinstery English teacher. I barely recognized her after her role as Adelle DeWitt in Dollhouse, and if I was fond of her then, I have a raging girl crush on her now. (Also I did NOT realize that in the TV special Miss Austen Regrets, she plays Jane Austen. Bumping that DVD up in my Netflix queue now.)

I thought Jenny was a fantastic character. I liked her immediately, from the first shot of her walking in the snow in her school uniform (tell me I’m not the only one who flashed to the schoolgirl groupies from A Hard Day’s Night). I loved the way she’d bait her father, dancing her book smarts around him with word play and bizarro logic.

And that, to me, explains a lot about her attraction to David. I mean, aside from his charm and his looks and his access to this magical mystical (and pretend) grown-up world, I got the impression that Jenny sees in him the first person that could hold his own with her. As for me, I just found him sort of creepy. Was I supposed to? Or was I also supposed to find him inordinately charming?

What I did NOT know before I sat down to watch the movie is that David is Jewish. I spent the rest of the film locked in an inner debate over whether I bought Peter Sarsgaard’s performance as a post-WWII British Jew. I settled on “sort of.” Hearing the word “schvartzers” come out of his mouth was jarring. And while it’s interesting to me that none of the reviews I’d read of this movie mentioned this detail, ultimately I think Jewishness wasn’t as essential to his character so much as it was to everyone else’s. To Jenny, it adds yet another layer of mystique, exoticism, and rebellion (and there’s a whole set of academic footnotes about that, but I won’t get into it now). We see from Jenny’s father’s bumbling introductions that he’s certainly got prejudices, but they’re overcome by the “right” individual. (Imagine if David had been Orthodox.) Emma Thompson’s reaction, that jerk of her body, her stony face, upon learning that the man Jenny plans to thrown her life away on is A JEW — well. If Dame Judi Dench can get an Oscar nomination for six minutes of film work, Emma Thompson deserved a nomination for that look.

No related posts.